East, west, and the space between: Poornima Manco on thirty years of writing and belonging

What does it mean to write from a life that straddles two worlds? Poornima Manco grew up in Delhi, moved to London in her twenties, and has spent the thirty years since navigating the space between East and West — as a flight attendant, as a mother, as a wife, and as a writer. Her short stories have been published in the Guardian and the Telegraph, and her debut novel, A Quiet Dissonance, drew directly from her experience of arriving somewhere new and trying to figure out where she fit.

In this conversation — recorded with my writing and publishing partner Victoria Dougherty — Poornima talks about the themes she keeps returning to in her fiction: identity, belonging, and the quiet question of who you are when the culture around you shifts. She also opens up about a health scare that came out of nowhere, what it's taught her about resilience, and why she does most of her best writing in hotel rooms on layovers.

We also end up somewhere I didn't expect: deep in a conversation about love. Poornima's own story — an arranged marriage that took five years of mutual avoidance before it finally clicked — is one of the most quietly beautiful things I've heard in a long time. And it says something true about timing, about readiness, and about the kind of commitment that has nothing to do with romance novels.

This is an episode for writers who are building something personal. Who aren't trying to write to market or kick out a twenty-book series — but who have something real to say and are figuring out how to say it. Poornima is proof that that path exists, and that it's worth taking.