Sara Rai (Sārā Rāy, born 15 September 1956), is a contemporary Indian writer, editor of anthologies and translator of modern Hindi and Urdu fiction. She lives in Allahabad (Uttar Pradesh) and New Delhi, India. Rai mainly writes and publishes short stories in Hindi. Written in a reflective prose style, her stories explore the individual complexities in the lives of ordinary people and outsiders in contemporary India. Background Sara Rai was born into a family of writers and artists based in Allahabad. Sara Rai's grandfather is the writer Dhanpat Rai Srivastava, better known by his pen name Munshi Premchand (Munśī Premcand). His second wife, Shivrani Devi (Śivrānī Devī, ?-1976), who was an active follower of Mahatma Gandhi, authored a memoir about her life with Premchand titled "Premcand ghar meṃ" ("Premchand at home", 1944). Sara Rai's father, the literary critic and painter Sripat Rai (Śrīpat Rāy, 1916-1994), was the founding editor of Kahani (Kahānī, 1937–39 and 1953–79), one of the leading literary journals of the Nayi Kahani (Nayī Kahānī) Movement. Her mother, Zahra Rai (Zahraʾ Rāy,1917-1993), also wrote and published short stories in Hindi. In her essay "You will be the Katherine Mansfield of Hindi", Sara Rai reflects her struggle of becoming a writer and finding her own literary voice in the multilingual and -cultural backgrounds of both her family and her home town Allahabad. Education and career Sara Rai received a master's degree in Modern History from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 1978. Three years later, she accomplished her masters in English Literature at the University of Allahabad. Rai started writing at a young age. Her first story "Lucky Horace" was published in the Damn You magazine founded and edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara's cousins Alok and Amit Rai in the early 1960s. Since the early 1990s, Rai has been working as a translator of fiction by Vinod Kumar Shukla, Premchand, Pankaj Bisht, Shaukat Hayat, Geetanjali Shree and others from Hindi and Urdu into English. She also translated a number of her own short stories into English. Besides, Rai took part in some film and theatre projects: She wrote the dialogues for the experimental Bombay documentary "Seven Islands and a Metro" (2004), directed by Madusree Dutta. Rai's first novel, "House of Kites" (original Hindi title cīlvālī koṭhī), came out in 2010. The novel narrates the story of a formerly wealthy, educated and secular lineage of Hindu Banias,