New India Foundation's Coveted Book Fellowship
to Go Annual Starting 2026

27 May 2026 

Since its inception, the New India Foundation (NIF) Book Fellowship has been awarded once every two years. Beginning 2026, NIF will move to an annual cycle. Applications will now open every year and remain open for approximately three months. 

The NIF Book Fellowship is distinctive in what it offers: a substantial monthly stipend, editorial support, mentorship, and access to a community of writers and thinkers. While the fellowship remains highly competitive, the move to an annual cycle is driven by a desire to expand NIF's reach and embrace greater thematic and intellectual diversity among its fellows. 

This move reflects NIF's ambition to do more for serious nonfiction in India. An annual fellowship will allow NIF to stay present in the minds of potential candidates and respond more nimbly to emerging themes and gaps in public discourse. Writers who narrowly miss selection will no longer have to wait two years to reapply, and a predictable annual window will allow aspiring fellows to plan their research and applications with greater familiarity. 

Over time, a larger and more frequently renewed cohort of fellows will build a richer alumni community — one capable of offering peer support, collaboration, and mentorship across generations of writers. A steady annual output of supported books will also create a more consistent cultural presence for serious nonfiction in India, signalling a long-term institutional commitment to the field.

“The move to an annual fellowship is a natural next step for NIF. We have always believed that serious nonfiction is essential to how India understands itself and we want to make that support even more consistent, accessible, and responsive to the writers who are doing this work.” — Niraja Gopal Jayal, Governing Board member, New India Foundation. 

“The sheer volume of interesting applications we receive in each round is indicative of the growing importance of nonfiction writing as a mode of engagement with the enormous transformations undergone by India since independence. An annual cycle of fellowship will allow us to nurture and expand the field as well as enrich its quality.”— Srinath Raghavan, Governing Board member, New India Foundation.

The New India Foundation started nearly 20 years ago to fill a perceived gap in our collective knowledge of our country’s history since independence. The intellectual motivation to support serious scholarship was supported by the desire to provide mentorship and community.

About the New India Foundation Today NIF runs three key programmes: the NIF Book Fellowship, a Translation Fellowship, and the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize. Over the past two decades, the NIF Book Fellowship has supported nearly 40 high-quality nonfiction books that explore various aspects of post-1947 India. These works range from political biographies and cultural histories to memoirs, each offering a distinctive interpretation of contemporary India. The New India Foundation is guided by an esteemed Board of Trustees, including Niraja Gopal Jayal, Srinath Raghavan, Manish Sabharwal, Rahul Matthan and Nandan Nilekani.