I have to begin this post by celebrating the authors who submitted their manuscripts and gave us the opportunity to read and become more familiar with their work. There isn’t a single one of you who doesn’t deserve this grant, and I wish that we could work with all of you. Thank you and we wish you all the greatest success in launching your books. I hope, if the opportunity allows, you will consider submitting your next book for one of our future grants.
The Page One Media Grant Project provides a full, free book publicity campaign — the same level of work Page One Media's paying clients receive — to an author from an underrepresented background who couldn't otherwise afford one. The firm awards a limited number of grants each year. You can read the full eligibility criteria and program history in our post, The Page One Media Grant Project.
Malavika Kannan is an exceptional young writer whose debut literary novel, Unprecedented Times, captured the minds and hearts of the team here at Page One. It begins during the fall of 2019 at Stanford University, where Rishika Kumar, a queer, climate activist, has joined the freshman class. You know where I’m going with this if you, like the rest of us, were a conscious human being at the start of 2020. I hope you’ll join us on this journey with Malavika, the Henry Holt team, and our main character, Rishi. It’s going to be a wild ride and you won’t want to miss it!
Malavika Kannan is a Gen Z, Tamil American writer. Across genres, Malavika’s work explores identity, power, kinship, and desire in modern, apocalyptic times. Her debut YA novel, All the Yellow Suns (Little, Brown), is a queer coming-of-(r)age story about activism and identity set in Florida. All the Yellow Suns draws from Malavika’s experiences growing up in Florida amid a crisis of racialized gun violence. At the age of 17, she organized with March for Our Lives, Giffords, and the Women’s March, taking part in the largest American youth protest since the Vietnam War. Malavika graduated from Stanford University in 2024.
Malavika is a frequent writer on race, gender, South Asian identity, and caste. Her reporting appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Emancipator, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Autostraddle, and elsewhere, and you can connect with her on Instagram and TikTok. Her other creative mediums are cartoons—she has a viral comic series, Diary of a Wimpy Mal, about survivorship and identity—and cooking; she’s the co-hosts of Girls Eat Girls, a sapphic supper club in Brooklyn, where she lives and writes.
Please join us in celebrating Malavika, Unprecedented Times, and a world in which diverse voices are elevated and supported equally based on the quality of their work and the substance of their books.
What is the Page One Media Pro Bono Book Publicity Grant?
It's an annual grant from literary PR firm Page One Media that covers the cost of a full book publicity campaign for an author from an underrepresented background who could not otherwise afford one. Page One Media awards up to a few grants a year.
Who won the 2026 Page One Media Pro Bono Book Publicity Grant?
Malavika Kannan, author of the debut literary novel Unprecedented Times (Henry Holt), won the 2026 grant.
What is Unprecedented Times about and when is it published?
Unprecedented Times is a queer campus novel following Rishika ‘Rishi’ Kumar through her freshman year at Stanford starting in fall 2019, as the COVID-19 pandemic upends her plans. It publishes from Henry Holt on August 18, 2026.
Who is Malavika Kannan?
Malavika Kannan is a Gen Z, Tamil American writer and journalist. She is the author of Unprecedented Times and the YA novel All the Yellow Suns, and a 2024 graduate of Stanford University.