Ruby Lal
Joined Atlas Obscura in 2024
Los Angeles Times Finalist and Emory Professor, Ruby Lal is the author of Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan (NY: W. W. Norton, 2018, 2020), which won the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Biography and was a Finalist in History for the LA Times Book Prize. Among the top ten pick of the Time Magazine, The Telegraph and the Prospect Magazine London, EMPRESS has been lauded by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC, The Indian Express, Business Standard and numerous other national and international journals, magazines and newspapers.
Lal is currently finalizing a remix of Empress for young adults. New York artist Molly Crabapple is illustrating this book, Tiger-Slayer (W. W. Norton, NY, forthcoming Spring 2025)
She is as well the author of Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World AND Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness. These books won much acclaim in international journals and magazines, The New York Review of Books, The Economic and Political Weekly, Revue Historique, and The Times Literary Supplement.
Lal has received numerous fellowships, among them from the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS), Uppsala, Sweden, and as Visiting Public Humanities Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto where she completed her latest biography, VAGABOND PRINCESS: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan (Yale University Press, Trade Books, February 2024).
Lal has written numerous essays and literary pieces in the USA and India. She speaks regularly at national and international conferences, in book clubs, literary festivals and ecumenical and literary retreats.
