Hello, Dreamer!
Welcome to The Dream Pedlar's emporium of delightful dreams and wondrous whimsies, of impossible illusions and fleeting fantasies! I'm very pleased your meanderings led you here.
I'm Anitha Krishnan, a speculative fiction author and an award-winning poet. I write contemporary, new adult fantasy with a dash of mysticism and soul-searching. Deities and dreams, loss and longing, grief and gallantry, hiraeth and heartbreak, all make frequent appearances in my stories and poems.
My contemporary fantasy novel, Dying Wishes, was a finalist for the 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in the Speculative Fiction category! Woohoo!
I have lived in and left pieces of my heart in many places across the world including Singapore, Australia, Canada, and most of all in my birthplace, India. I presently live in Burlington, Ontario with my husband (who goes by KrA on this site) and our much cherished child, D, who is growing up at a reckless pace.
My days are filled with juggling writing and parenting. I've spent years wondering if balance and contentment were something I dared to desire in my life, so consistently elusive they had proven to be.
In fact, for the first three and a half decades of my life, I bumbled along with little clue as to what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be and believing happiness lay in being someone else and somewhere else, doing something else.
Then D came along and gave me the burning desire to be the kind of person who is true to herself and sets out to achieve the dreams she dares to dream.
And so it happened that after decades of nursing a desire to write for a living and not once believing I could, I wrote and published my first book during the first eighteen months of D's life. Since then I have published many books and have written several other works that are on their way to publication. You can find all of my published works here.
If you'd like to stay in touch, you can subscribe to my free monthly newsletter, Monthly Missives from The Dream Pedlar, which I send on the last Sunday of every month, with heartfelt updates on my writing life, book recommendations, short fiction and/or poems, and occasional surprises!
Subscription is free, and you will be the first to know whenever new and surprising delights turn up in my emporium.
Additionally, every Friday I post a new and original short fantasy tale on the website. I've been writing these Tales for Dreamers for more than a decade now and there's a collection of more than 100 such tales on the website, all of which you can start to read right away!
Thank you for visiting. Now that you are here, I hope you will stay.
Stay for a while. Or stay for a little longer. Long enough to lose yourself in a dream.
~ Anitha Krishnan
Burlington, Ontario
February 2024