Malavika Kannan

Malavika (pronounced Mah-love-eeka. Take it slow, you've got this) is a Gen Z Tamil American writer. She is the author of UNPRECEDENTED TIMES (forthcoming Henry Holt 2026), a campus novel set against the apocalyptic background of the pandemic. Malavika has been praised as a "young, perhaps talented woman," "liberal twig," and also "lazy, dumb, and loose," by men online, which is another way of saying her work explores themes of modern girlhood, relationships and the self, personal and political histories, and the obliterating experience of queer desire.

Her villain origin story is that, as a teenager in Florida growing up amid a crisis of racialized gun violence, she organized with March for Our Lives, Giffords, and the Women's March, taking part in the largest American youth protest since the Vietnam War. Her debut YA novel, ALL THE YELLOW SUNS (Little & Brown 2023), is a queer coming-of-(r)age story about activism and identity set in Florida, drawing from these experiences. Malavika has been featured by Seventeen Magazine and Good Morning America, and she graduated from Stanford University in 2024.

Mal is also a frequent writer on race, gender, South Asian identity, and caste. Her reporting appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Emancipator, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere, and she posts for an audience of 50,000 across Instagram and TikTok. Her other creative mediums are cartoons -- she has a viral comic series, Diary of a Wimpy Mal, about survivorship and identity -- and cooking; she's the co-hosts of Girls Eat Girls, a sapphic supper club in Brooklyn, where she lives and writes.

https://www.malavikakannan.com/