Allie Nava

Allie Nava is an American author of literary fiction whose debut novel draws on her experience as a survivor of the anti-Tamil violence of 1970s and 1980s Sri Lanka. Before turning to full-time writing she worked as an executive in finance and law and served as an advisor and board member for several mission-driven organizations, including the Bellevue Literary Review and the women-led investor network Golden Seeds. Her short fiction appeared in literary journals — including the long-running flash-fiction project Six Sentences — before her first novel was published. She has been recognized for her writing and her cross-sector work by Amazon, Harvard University and Asia Society, and she lectures on resilience, civic engagement and the role of fiction in preserving the historical record of communal violence. Her debut novel "July and Everything After" was released on September 16, 2024 by DartFrog Books. The book is a work of fiction based on the events of Black July 1983, the organized pogrom against Sri Lanka's Tamil minority that began in Colombo and spread across the island. The story follows Maya, a young Tamil woman who barely escapes the killings, returns to the United States haunted by what she has seen, and tries to organize a group of allies — including a Norwegian-American friend, a Catholic nun and a figure from her past — to bring the atrocities to wider attention. The novel was named a First Horizon Award Finalist and a Hawthorne Prize Finalist by the Eric Hoffer Book Awards and was included on the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Short List. Nava's work sits at the intersection of literary fiction and witness writing, alongside other diaspora authors who have used the novel form to document state and communal violence in South Asia. Her writing is concerned with the long aftermath of political violence — survivor's guilt, identity, faith and the practical question of how ordinary people convert private grief into public testimony.