Sayantani DasGupta

Sayantani DasGupta is a New York Times–bestselling author, pediatrician by training, and scholar of narrative medicine whose work bridges storytelling and health humanities. She is the author of the middle-grade fantasy series Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond, which includes The Serpent’s Secret, Game of Stars, and The Chaos Curse, as well as related Kingdom Beyond novels such as Force of Fire. Her other books for young readers include She Persisted: Virginia Apgar and the Girl Scouts title Anika and the Great Dog Rescue, and she has also written two contemporary YA novels inspired by Jane Austen, Debating Darcy and Rosewood: A Midsummer Meet Cute.

Originally trained in pediatrics and public health, DasGupta earned her M.D. and M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University and holds an A.B. from Brown University. She is a faculty member at Columbia University, where she helped found the master’s program in narrative medicine and teaches in medical humanities; she has also taught in the graduate program in Health Advocacy at Sarah Lawrence College. In addition to her fiction, she is co-author or editor of several scholarly works, including The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales, *Her Own Medicine: A Woman