Sangu Mandanna Books in Order

If you want cozy fantasy for adults: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches → A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping
If you want mythic YA space fantasy: A Spark of White Fire → A House of Rage and Sorrow → A War of Swallowed Stars
If you want portal fantasy and Indian mythology: Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom → Kiki Kallira Conquers a Curse
If you want magical school adventure: Vanya and the Wild Hunt → Vanya and the Silver Spindle
If you want a darker YA standalone: The Lost Girl

Sangu Mandanna was born in Bengaluru and grew up in Karnataka in south India, surrounded by stories. She has said she started writing when she was four, after an elephant chased her down a forest road and she turned the whole thing into a story instead of a fear. That feels like a good clue to the writer she would become: someone who takes the strange, the frightening, and the magical, and turns them into something human.

She was serious about it early.

At nine, she was already making homemade books, complete with stapled pages and her photo on the back. She sent out her first query at fifteen and signed with her first agent at twenty-two, after a lot of work and a lot of rejection. By then she had moved to England to study English literature and creative writing at Lancaster University, and she was still writing toward the books that would finally reach readers.

Her debut novel, The Lost Girl, grew out of rereading Frankenstein at university and asking what a story of creation might look like from the made girl's side. It is a darker, more haunted book than some of the novels she became known for later, but the questions that drive it still feel very Mandanna: who gets to be fully human, what grief does to love, and what it means to belong in a life that was never meant for you.

Those questions show up again in very different shapes across her work. In the Celestial trilogy, beginning with A Spark of White Fire, she turns the Mahabharata into a space opera full of royal power struggles, living ships, and impossible family loyalties. The idea came when her young child became fascinated by the solar system and space, and those two threads suddenly clicked together for her.

She likes big stories, but she never forgets the people inside them.

That mix of scale and feeling carries into her books for younger readers. Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom follows a young artist whose drawings of South Indian mythology come alive, while Vanya and the Wild Hunt sends an eleven-year-old girl who talks to books into a magical school full of monsters and secrets. Mandanna has said she grew up with very few stories about brown girls, and her fiction often answers that absence directly.

She has also worked as an editor. With Color Outside the Lines, she brought together YA stories about interracial and LGBTQ+ love, building the kind of collection she wanted to see more of on shelves. That work fits the larger thread in her fiction. Mandanna has spoken openly about living with OCD, anxiety, and depression, and her books often make room for characters whose inner lives are messy, anxious, or still taking shape.

Her adult fantasy novels brought many new readers to her work. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches is about a lonely witch stumbling into found family and love, and A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping pairs lost magic with an enchanted inn and a sharply funny romance. Readers often come to Mandanna for the magic and stay for the people: prickly heroines, complicated families, talking books, talking foxes, and characters who badly want a home that will let them be fully themselves.

She now lives in Norwich, in the east of England, with her husband and children. When she talks about writing, she often makes it sound less like a grand calling and more like something she has simply always done, stubbornly and joyfully, for a very long time. That plain stubbornness may be part of the secret.