about 💌

Malavika Kannan (b. 2001) is a Tamil American writer. Across genres, Mal's work explores identity, power, kinship, and desire in modern, apocalyptic times. She's the author of the campus novel UNPRECEDENTED TIMES, about college students navigating love and life during the Covid-19 pandemic, forthcoming August 2026 from Holt. ​

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Young and young-at-heart readers—55,000 of them across Instagram, TikTok, and Substack—turn to Malavika for original reporting and creative, empathetic takes. Her nonfiction appears in The Nation, Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Autostraddle, The Emancipator, and elsewhere. In 2024, she taught a first-of-its-kind course at Stanford University, The Mindy Kaling Cinematic Universe, about pop culture and South Asian American identity.

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Mal's 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. These experiences birthed her debut YA novel, ALL THE YELLOW SUNS (Little & Brown 2023), a queer coming-of-age story set in Florida. 

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When not writing, Malavika draws a comic series about survivorship and moonlights as a gay socialite in Brooklyn, where she co-hosts the popular mutual aid supper club Girls Eat Girls. 

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