TANYA MENDONSA is a poet, writer and painter. She was educated at Loreto school and college in Calcutta. After spending twenty years in Paris, studying French literature at the Sorbonne, painting and running a language school, she returned to India, a story told in her memoir “The Book of Joshua”.

HarperCollins published her first collection of poetry, “The Dreaming House” in 2009, it ranged effortlessly in theme, maintaining a startling clarity of vision and language, with a foreword by Amitav Ghosh, who said, “Tanya Mendonsa’s work is cosmopolitan in reference… yet deeply rooted in a magical corner of a storied land.“ .

Harper Collins also published her second collection of poetry, “All The Answer I Shall Ever Get” in 2016. A second edition of “The Dreaming House” was released in 2012, while the third edition of “The Book of Joshua” was released in 2020.

Her book of verse on the city of Calcutta, “Infinite Memories“Memories“ (with the photographer Laurence Toussaint) was published by Editions Signum, Paris, in 2017.

Her long poem, “The Fisher of Perch – A Fable for Our Times“ was published in book form to great acclaim by Paper Project in 2017 –

Another memoir, “A Bite In Time : Cooking with Memories “( with a foreword by Olivia Potts of The Spectator, UK ) will be published in 2021.
She is currently working on a new collection of poetry, “A Stone, A Star”

Her poems have been widely anthologized. She currently lives in the blue mountains of the Nilgiris with the abstract painter Antonio E Costa.