Vauhini Vara
Canadian-American journalist, writer
Vauhini Vara (born 1 August 1982) Vauhini Vara is a Canadian-born American journalist, fiction writer, and the former business editor of The New Yorker. She lives in Colorado and is a contributing writer for The New Yorker website. Her first novel "The Immortal King Rao" is highly acclaimed and came out in May of 2022.
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- I started working right away as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. They put me in the San Francisco bureau of the Journal, which was the bureau that covered technology, and my first beat was writing about Oracle, which was this big business software company, and about Larry Ellison, the CEO at the time of that company.
- Then, at the same time, it was 2006 and Facebook had just started and the Wall Street Journal didn’t have anyone writing about Facebook because it was such a small company at the time. Since I was the youngest person in the office, I just ended up being the person who was writing about Facebook as it got bigger and bigger. So, while I was writing about this big long-existing tech company that started in the ’70s, I was also getting to know Mark Zuckerberg and writing the Wall Street Journal’s first stories about Facebook. It was a fascinating experience.
- I had a kind of Trump-like character, who was very much based on Trump, who I wrote into the book as part of the explanation of the process by which the new world order emerges. I wrote this character before Trump was at all a credible candidate. I think I wrote it in 2014 when there were rumbles that he wanted to run but nobody thought that he was really going to do it and be taken seriously. So, in my attempt at world-building, I thought, okay, there’s no way Trump is going to win now, but I could totally imagine a world in which somebody like him comes along and wins in a decade, or something. Then, later on, when he became President, friends would read that version of the book and be like, "I don’t understand why Trump is here when it’s supposed to be many years in the future." So, I had to change that character and turn the screw a little bit more to make it not as realistic.
- Because I had covered Silicon Valley since 2004, the year Google went public and when Facebook was started, I was able to meet and interview many young technology CEOs. For my novel, I decided to create the character King Rao, have him grow up on a coconut farm in South India in the 1950s, move to the states in the 1970s and ultimately open an Apple-like tech company.”
- [ https://www.timesunion.com/books/article/pulitzer-prize-finalist-vauhini-vara-visiting-18410475.php Pulitzer Prize finalist Vauhini Vara visiting Albany on Oct. 17] (Updated Oct 12, 2023 )
