Tanwi Nandini Islam

Tanaïs first worked in New York City as a community organizer at Make the Road New York, a non-profit organization based in Bushwick, Brooklyn to empower working class communities.^[4] Later in 2006 in New Delhi, India through the William J. Clinton Fellowship for Service, they started writing their first draft of their debut novel Bright Lines. The novel was named finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize,^[5] and the Edmund White Award for debut fiction.

While writing Bright Lines, Tanaïs grew interested in olfaction and started their own botanically based perfume and candle line Hi Wildflower Botanica, now renamed Studio Tanaïs.^[6]

Tanaïs's 2022 memoir, In Sensorium, won the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.^[7]

• 2015: Bright Lines, Penguin Books, ISBN 978-0143123132
• 2022: In Sensorium: Notes For My People, Harper Books, ISBN 978-0358381709