Compass and Mirror: Navigating Truth in Non-Fiction Narratives

In an immersive two-part nonfiction workshop, award-winning journalist and author Mansi Choksi guides writers through the art of telling true stories with voice, structure, and ethical clarity.

You’ll explore how to shape narratives that balance intimacy and perspective, build trust with sources and readers, and experiment with form. Through discussions, close readings and generative exercises, the workshop will dive into key elements of craft—perspective, scene, structure, and curiosity as the beginning of empathy.

Whether you’re working on reported features, memoir, essays, or hybrid nonfiction, this workshop offers practical tools and a supportive space to develop a work-in-progress or begin something new.

Dates: 19 June and 17 July
Time: 7 - 9PM
Location: WH50, Project Space, Alserkal Arts Foundation

Note: The same workshop takes place on both days. Please RSVP to one of the session.

About the Author

Mansi Choksi is an award-winning journalist writing about the intersection of gender, crime, opportunity and pop-culture. Her first non-fiction book, The Newlyweds, about love and crime in India, was published to rave reviews in 2022. The Times London called it "a staggeringly good work of literary journalism" and The Financial Times said it was "a compelling and heartbreaking book." It was the basis of a National Public Radio podcast called "Love Commandos" which aired in 2023. She is a two-time finalist of the Livingston Award in International Reporting, winner of the Overseas Press Club of America’s Madeline Dane Ross Award and the South Asian Journalists Association’s Outstanding Arts and Culture Reporting Award. Previously, she won New York University's Reporting Award and the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Reporting Grant for Women’s Stories and two African Great Lakes Fellowships.

She graduated with honors from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York, which she attended as a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Scholar. She was born in Mumbai, India and lives in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. She is represented by the Wylie Agency.


Image courtesy of artist Buddhadev Mukherjee.