An Act of Kindness: A Guest Post by Sangu Mandanna

Congratulations to the Young Reader Winner of the 2025 B&N Children’s and YA Book Awards! Overflowing with magic and wonder, Vanya and the Wild Hunt is an action-packed fantasy adventure inspired by Indian mythology and steeped in British folklore. Read on for an exclusive essay from Sangu Mandanna on writing Vanya and the Wild Hunt.

Writing Vanya and the Wild Hunt started out as an act of defiance and turned into an act of kindness. Growing up, I was a child of myths and magic. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on, but my favourite stories were the fantasies, the fairytales, the folklore. The tales of swords and wands, dragons and bards, gods and goddesses from all corners of the world, elves doing favours for kind shoemakers and monsters who maybe weren’t all that monstrous after all.

But I always knew that there was no place for me in those stories. Characters who looked like me were rare and, when they did appear, they were caricatures or bit parts. As a child, I never got to see myself as the hero wielding the sword, the witch casting the spells in battle, the beautiful high elf, the rider on the back of the ferocious dragon.

Writers sometimes say, only half in jest, that we write our stories out of spite. To prove wrong everybody who said we couldn’t. To claim space for ourselves that is never freely offered.

That’s how Vanya’s story began. I was determined to write the book I never got to have. A book full of mythology, folklore, friendship, magical libraries, fantastical creatures, and so much more. I wanted to tell a story that would combine my lifelong love of stories with my lifelong desire to defy the expectation that I would be content with nothing but those same stories. I was going to write myself, my children and my family into the stories we’d once been excluded from.

The defiance only got me so far, though. As I started to write this book, something was missing. Vanya was taking shape on the page and she wasn’t what I’d expected. I was coming to terms with my ADHD diagnosis at the time, particularly with the relief that there was finally an explanation for all the things about me I’d been told  were simply “weird” and “not quite right,” and Vanya, it turned out, wanted to be all those things too. She wanted to show me that a brown, bookish neurodivergent girl could be a brave, kind, feisty fantasy heroine.

In the end, writing Vanya and the Wild Hunt was an act of kindness, a gift to my younger self and, even more importantly, a gift to all the kids out there who have been told that they don’t have a place in stories like this. They do. You do. Everybody is welcome in Auramere.