Tara (K.) Menon is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Harvard University. She holds a BA in English from Columbia University and a MA, MPhil, and PhD in English from New York University. From 2019 to 2023 she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She was born in India, grew up in Singapore, spent a decade in New York, and now works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Her debut novel, Under Water, is published by Summit in the UK and Riverhead in the US. It has been, or will be, translated into 34 other languages. Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Sewanee Review,The Point, Bookforum, The Paris Review, and Public Books, where she co-edits the Literary Fiction section.

Her first academic monograph Speaking Parts: Conversation, Character, and Social Worlds, will be published by Princeton University Press on September 8, 2026. Her academic work has appeared in Narrative, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, and Studies in the Novel.

She is currently working on two books—Refuge, a second novel, and Forms of Anger, a work of literary criticism about anger and the novel—and is always dreaming about writing about sport, especially football.