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Welcome to our New Faces column, where you can meet new romance authors and find out about their books. This time we're visiting with Shobhan Bantwal, whose unusual first romance is set in India. It's called The Dowry Bride and it's available from Kensington Books. Shobhan, welcome to TRR! Tell us about yourself. I was born and raised in a small town in India along with my four sisters. My father was a doctor and my mother worked as his office manager. After acquiring a master's degree in sociology, I came to the United States in an arranged marriage. My husband had been working and living in the U.S. for three years before we met. We have been happily married for 34 years and almost all those years we've been living in New Jersey. We have one married daughter and she just had her first baby (girl) ten days ago. We're blessed and thrilled to be grandparents. Are you coming to romance writing from another job? My full-time job was and still is working for the government. I took up writing as a hobby when menopausal problems were turning into a minor nightmare around 2002, including major surgery. But I figured I might as well put those hormonal changes to creative use instead of complaining. I graduated from freelance articles and short stories to full length novels in a very short time. What led you to write romance? I've always loved reading romances. Growing up in India, what we had available in our rural town were used, dog-eared Mills & Boon romances published in England. I tried to get my hands on as many as I could. My writing is unusual though, more along the lines of mainstream women's fiction with strong romantic elements than formula-oriented romance, mostly because I write about India and/or Indian-American characters and it's not easy to fit that into the pure romance genre. But it is definitely romantic in nature. Tell us about your road to publication. I took one short Creative Writing course at the local community college in 2002. For a while I wrote freelance non-fiction articles for various India-American print and e-publications. It was a confidence-building exercise. Then in 2004, two of my classmates from the writing course and I formed a critique group, and the two women turned out to be a tremendous source of inspiration and help in polishing up my writing. I wrote short stories and entered them in a few contests. Amazingly I won Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest Fiction Competition in the Romance category. I also won Honorable Mention in a New York Stories contest and First Place in a contest run by an Indian women's magazine called New Woman. All those minor successes inspired me to take on the challenge of full-length novels. I wrote THE DOWRY BRIDE and was signed on by a great agent in 2005 (The Elaine Koster Literary Agency that represents NYT bestseller, Khaled Hosseini) and got a two-book contract with Kensington in April 2006. What kind of research was involved for your first book? THE DOWRY BRIDE didn't take too much effort to research. There's oodles of material on the subject of dowry abuse in India and its related atrocities. Besides, while I was growing up, although dowry never touched my marriage or anyone in my family, it was a decadent practice that lots of other people were involved in. It both shocked and saddened me to know that thousands of young Indian women my age were suffering abuse and even death because of greedy in-laws who wanted larger dowries. One of the reasons I chose this subject is to bring to light something that not many writers have tackled as the main topic in their books, especially not as romantic fiction. Women's rights are important to me, and telling an intriguing story set in India and its culture was my way of both educating as well as entertaining American readers. Tell us about your debut book. THE DOWRY BRIDE is the story of one young woman trapped in India's arranged marriage and dowry system and her dramatic escape and action-packed journey to freedom and hope with the help of one brave young man who also heals her broken heart. Caught between tradition and the truths buried in her heart, Megha, the young dowry bride, will discover the real cost of falling in love with her gallant rescuer... Who are your influences as a writer? I'm a huge fan of Dorothy Garlock, Judith McNaught, Nora Roberts and Anjali Banerjee. Dorothy and Anjali are such sweet and supportive women that when I asked them for cover blurbs for my book, they immediately offered to do it. Within weeks I had wonderful blurbs for my front and back covers. I'll always be grateful to these two ladies for their kindness. I wish all bestselling authors could be so generous. What does your family think of having a published romance author in their midst? My family is thrilled to have a published author in their midst. In fact, it is my daughter who gave me the final nudge to writing a novel. I couldn't have done it without her and my ever-supportive husband, who helps me with my marketing efforts and talks up my upcoming book every chance he gets. And he doesn't even read romance! When I'm in the creative mood and park myself before my computer, the poor man has to settle for junk food and at times total neglect. Tell us about plans for future books. Since I have a two-book contract with Kensington, I'm discussing some ideas with both my editor and my agent for the second book. It will definitely be set in India, like the first one. But since it's only in the conceptual phase, it's too soon to say when the second one might be released. How can readers get in touch with you? Readers can contact me through my web site: www.shobhanbantwal.com My e-mail address is shobhan@shobhanbantwal.com and can be accessed on the contact page of my web site. Once again, thank you so much for inviting me to do an interview for The Romance Reader. I appreciate the interest and the wonderful opportunity you've given me to connect with so many readers and tell them about my unusual kind of romance.
Shobhan, thank you for joining us, and best of luck with your future books!
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