About

Radha Vatsal’s new historical crime novel, No. 10 Doyers Street (coming March 2025), takes place in New York City’s Chinatown in the early 1900s. She is also the author of the acclaimed Kitty Weeks mystery novels set in World War I-era New York. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Born and raised in Mumbai, India, she earned her Ph.D. in Film History from Duke University and has worked as a film curator, political speechwriter, and freelance journalist. She lives in New York City.

Long Version:

Radha Vatsal’s new historical crime novel, No. 10 Doyers Street (coming March 2025), is set in New York City’s Chinatown in the early 1900s. She is also the author of the acclaimed Kitty Weeks mystery novels set in World War I-era New York.

Her essays and stories have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Smithsonian Magazine, CrimeReads, Kirkus Reviews (for which she wrote a bi-weekly column), Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She is co-editor (with Jane Gaines and Monica Dall’Asta) of the Women Film Pioneers Project, an online resource that catalogues the work of women in the silent-film industry.

Born and raised in Mumbai, India, Radha was a Morehead-Cain scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received her Ph.D. from Duke University where she studied Victorian literature and film history. She has discussed her work on NPR, public TV, and at libraries, bookstores and mystery panels across the country. 

Radha used to be fluent in Russian, which she studied at the House of Soviet Culture in Mumbai (then Bombay). She traveled solo on the Tran-Siberian Railroad, and for one summer, worked as a translator in the Far East of Russia, near the Russian-Chinese border. She loves paper ephemera, and is a tennis enthusiast.  She lives in New York City.