Sunil received his MFA in Fiction from Hunter College in New York City in 2010, where he worked with two-time Booker Prize winning author Peter Carey, and the 2009 National Book Award winner (Let the Great World Spin) Colum McCann.
While at Hunter Sunil won second place in the Miriam Weinberg Richter Memorial Fiction contest for an excerpt from his novel-in-progress, and was also awarded the Alumni Scholarship & Welfare Fund Fellowship, awarded to one fiction student every three years. He was selected twice as the Esquire Fiction Intern, Fall 2009, and then again in Spring 2010. He was also twice selected as a Hertog Fellow, and worked as a research assistant for Zadie Smith, as well as Ben Marcus.
In June 2010, he won the Asian American Short Story Award, sponsored by Hyphen Magazine and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York.
In May 2010, he was the writer-in-residence at the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hyphen Magazine, The Tottenville Review, Pindeldyboz: Stories that Defy Classification, and The Multicultural Review, and he has received scholarships to The New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
The son of a Sri Lankan father, and a mother from Montana, he grew up in central Pennsylvania, and has since traveled and lived in 48 states and 35 countries.
He is currently working on a novel set during the WTO protests in Seattle, November 1999.
contact: sunil.s.yapa@gmail.com
