About the Writer

Image of the writer seated on a stone ledge with theirs legs one on top of the other, writing in a book.

Swathi is trained in journalistic and film writing. She has been writing from the age of eight. Her writing has appeared in online literary communities and magazines such as Litbreak Magazine, Commonwealth Writers, Berlin Artparasites, The Alipore Post, New Asian Writing, and Youth ki Awaaz.

Swathi's experiences range from print journalism to film making, and a host of other areas such as marketing and communications. When she was a food television producer at Zee's Living Foodz, she produced a magazine format food show, where she hung out with her interviewees, ate loads of food, wrote scripts, shot stories, and cried at the edit table trying to figure out how to finish or sometimes 'fix' a story. Soon after, she dabbled in sports content curation at an Indian premium streaming platform (Disney+ Hotstar), and checked out user-centered writing at a billion dollar startup (Freshworks) and until recently was a user experience writer at Postman working in the enterprise unit (she's not sure how big an organization it is, but who cares?)

When she's not writing, she can be found scouring a city for its coffee or literary community, and reading like there's no tomorrow. She enjoys reading flash fiction, illustrated poetry, magical realism, thrillers, long-form essays and biographies; and writes heartfelt missives to people she adores, including her parents' tail-wagging fanatics, A and K.

She believes in the phrase 'everything happens for a reason.'

Oh, she loves alliterations! In her own words, 'alliterations are always awesome.'

She lives and works from Berlin, which involves building her website, curating her newsletter, editing children's books, critiquing and beta-reading books, helping corporates with marketing and outbound communication, and (struggling with) writing her first short story collection. She loves her freelance biz, but despises having to fill forms, generate invoices and keep track of advances and pending payments.

She aspires to achieve all the following at some point in her life: become a founder or founding member of a literary community, write a book, grow a community garden filled with flowers, fruits, vegetables, flitting butterflies and buzzing bees.

She still wonders why she's writing this in third person, but feels this is the closest it can get to being personal, and professional, and so, she signs off.