Meet 6 Indian-origin writers actually based in Barcelona & Catalunya

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Meet 6 Indian-origin writers actually based in Barcelona & Catalunya

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25 August, 2026

10 min read

La hija del Ganges — Asha Miró — book cover

El agua de la gota — Raimon Panikkar — book cover

Los mundos de Kaur — Manu Kaur — book cover

Sabores e historias de mi cocina india. Rasa — Anjalina Chugani — book cover

Negotiate Good, Negotiate Well — Kandarp Mehta — book cover

Six Indian voices who write from Barcelona and Catalunya — not about it from a distance

6 Indian Writers Who Call Catalunya Home — And the Books They’ve Written About It

Your neighbour on the metro to Plaça Catalunya might have a novel out. The auntie behind the counter of a Raval spice shop might be quoted on a philosophy syllabus. Barcelona and Catalunya have quietly become home to a small, brilliant cluster of Indian-origin writers — and almost nobody talks about it.

We’re fixing that. Six authors, eight books, one very specific rule: everyone on this list actually lives — or lived — here. Not “wrote a book that mentions India once.” Not “Indian-sounding name, based in London.” We checked every single one before they made the cut, and we quietly dropped a seventh name mid-research when it turned out she lives in Portugal, not Catalunya. Real ones only.

One very specific rule, six writers who passed it

6Authors

8Books

6Genres

Meet the six:

Asha Miró Raimon Panikkar Manu Kaur Anjalina Chugani Sree Jith Kandarp Mehta FAQ

Your shelf, sorted: a Barcelona bestseller about adoption, a legendary philosopher born of a Catalan mother and an Indian father, a debut novel about two generations of Punjabi women, a chef’s love letter to Indian cooking from her Barcelona kitchen, a Kerala-born ex-Navy officer turned Barcelona novelist, and an IESE professor’s book on negotiation.

Memoir

Asha Miró

Nashik-born · Barcelona since childhood

Adopted from a Bombay orphanage into a Barcelona family as a young child, Asha Miró grew up in the Eixample, studied Slavic Philology at the Universitat de Barcelona, and went on to spend decades as one of Catalan public television’s most recognisable faces — presenting travel and documentary programming for TV3 that took her back to India again and again, this time as a journalist rather than a subject.

Her memoir La hija del Ganges (Daughter of the Ganges, 2003) turned that first return trip into a book that became a European bestseller, was translated into more than a dozen languages, and later inspired both a documentary and an animated series for young readers. It still reads like the original Barcelona book about living between two homes — written years before “third culture kid” was a phrase anyone used. Las dos caras de la luna picks the story back up with a second journey to India and an emotional reunion with her biological sister, and Miró has continued writing and speaking publicly about adoption and intercultural identity in Catalunya ever since.

If you’ve ever felt the tug between “home” and “home” — this is the book that named that feeling, decades before “expat” was even a word people used.

🐕 La hija del Ganges 🎧 Las dos caras de la luna

Philosophy

Raimon Panikkar

Barcelona 1918 · Tavertet 2010

Long before “Indian expat in Catalunya” was a community with a WhatsApp channel, Raimon Panikkar was living proof it could work in both directions. Born in Barcelona to a Catalan Catholic mother and a Malayali Hindu father from Kerala, he earned doctorates in philosophy, chemistry, and theology, was ordained a Catholic priest, and then spent the rest of his life refusing to pick a single tradition — teaching in India at Mysore and Banaras Hindu University before holding the chair of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara for over fifteen years.

His 1988–89 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh — among the oldest and most prestigious lecture series in the English-speaking world — became The Rhythm of Being, and remain one of the clearest single statements of a life spent building bridges between Hindu and Christian thought rather than choosing sides. He eventually retired to Tavertet, in the Catalan pre-Pyrenees, where he founded Vivarium, a small centre for intercultural and interreligious study that continued his work after his death in 2010. El agua de la gota collects fragments of his personal diaries, and is the most intimate entry point into a body of work that runs to dozens of books.

“I left Europe a Christian, found myself a Hindu, and returned a Buddhist, without ever having ceased to be Christian.”

📚 Browse his books

Fiction

Manu Kaur

Born in Calella, Barcelona coast

Noveprit Singh Kaur, who writes as Manu Kaur, was born in Calella to parents who emigrated from Punjab in the 1990s — part of the wave that made the Maresme coast one of the real centres of Sikh and Punjabi life in Catalunya, not just a footnote in it. By day she’s a licensed Catalunya tourism guide and works supporting migrant integration; by night, that same ground-level view of two generations trying to understand each other became a novel.

Los mundos de Kaur (selected for PLAS 2021) traces two generations of Indian-origin women building lives in the West: fear, solidarity, motherhood, and the specific weight of being caught between your family’s origin and your own birthplace. It carries a 4.8-star average on Amazon.es, and Kaur has since taken the book on the road herself — presenting and discussing it at literary events from Badalona to Vic. An English translation, Kaur’s Worlds, followed in 2025, opening the story to readers who’d otherwise only get it secondhand.

A rare own-voices account of second-generation identity, written from inside Catalunya — not looking in from India, the UK or the US.

🐕 Los mundos de Kaur 📗 Kaur’s Worlds (EN)

Cookbook

Anjalina Chugani

London-born · Bangalore years · Barcelona today

Anjalina Chugani was born in London, spent formative years reconnecting with her roots in Bangalore, and now cooks and writes from Barcelona under her own brand, Soul Spices Kitchen — part recipe archive, part YouTube channel, part running conversation about what it means to cook Indian food a long way from where you learned it. She’s guested on food podcasts talking through that journey, and even contributes the occasional Catalan-leaning recipe to local food press, which tells you as much about how she cooks as any bio could.

Sabores e historias de mi cocina india. Rasa (Larousse, 2023) is part memoir, part recipe book — more than 100 recipes structured around chapters of her own migration story, photographed on location in India. It carries 4.9 stars from 20 reviews on Amazon.es, and readers keep saying the same thing: unfussy, personal, actually cookable on a Tuesday night, not just for show. A second book, Soul Spices, followed for readers who wanted more.

Homesick for one specific flavour and tired of adapting recipes to whatever the local Mercadona has? Someone already solved that, in this exact city.

🐕 Sabores e historias de mi cocina india

Fiction

Sree Jith

Thiruvananthapuram · Barcelona since 2022

Sree Jith is an ex-marine from the Indian Navy who moved from Kerala to Spain in 2022 to lead a team developing Conversational AI at Allianz Technology. Beyond his career in tech, he is a passionate writer, having written over 100 poems and 50 short stories and novels.

His English publishing debut, Epics of Hope: An Indian’s Reminiscence of Barcelona (2024, 4.8 stars), structures his experience of the city as four novellas filtered through an Indian lens. The collection unfolds across four stories, each carrying the emotion of the season it was written in — including one built entirely around a break-in and the ensuing insurance claim, peak Catalan bureaucracy comedy that anyone who’s filed a Spanish denuncia will recognise instantly.

In 2026 he published his second novel, The Fragments of a Lost Soul: A Mysterious Journey — an exploration of the philosophy of life, love and grief, told as a mystical journey of a soul threaded with memory and loss through the nostalgic pathways of Barcelona, with a brief reminder of India.

Sree Jith is the pioneer Indian writer without EU citizenship or residency to publish English fiction from Spain — a specific, relatable, and inspiring milestone for anyone still working through their own manuscript.

Two honest fictions with a deep-rooted philosophy on the many dimensions of human and animal life while figuring out life in a new city — told by someone who was still figuring it out himself while writing them.

🐕 Epics of Hope 📘 The Fragments of a Lost Soul

Business

Kandarp Mehta

Senior lecturer, IESE Business School, Barcelona

Kandarp Mehta teaches at IESE Business School, one of the world’s top-ranked MBA programmes, headquartered right here in Barcelona — where negotiation is his specific research lane, both inside the MBA classroom and in IESE’s executive-education cohorts. He’s been quoted in the business press, including Forbes India, on how negotiation actually changes under pressure — not the textbook version, the one that happens when a deal is already going sideways.

With fellow IESE professor Guido Stein, he co-wrote Negotiate Good, Negotiate Well: The Power of Ambidexterity (2021), distilling three decades of teaching and research into a practical framework for negotiating effectively, not just persuasively. It’s the one book on this list that isn’t about identity or migration at all — it’s simply useful, from someone teaching a few metro stops away, and arguably the most quietly practical read for anyone about to negotiate their first Barcelona salary or lease.

Solid pick if you’re job-hunting, negotiating a Barcelona salary, or just tired of business books written by people who’ve never had to negotiate rent in a foreign language.

🐕 Negotiate Good, Negotiate Well

Build your Indian-Catalunya shelf in 4 moves

1 Start with La hija del Ganges for the emotional anchor — the book that put this whole thread on the map.
2 Add Epics of Hope or Los mundos de Kaur for a contemporary, community-adjacent read.
3 Keep Sabores e historias de mi cocina india in the kitchen, not the shelf — it’s meant to get sauce on it.
4 Finish with El agua de la gota when you want something slower — Panikkar rewards re-reading.

Why we built this list this way

Every author confirmed as currently or formerly Catalunya-based —

Spanish, English and everything in between — because that’s what living here actually sounds like.

Six genres on purpose — memoir, fiction, cookbook, philosophy, business — because the Indian-Catalunya story isn’t one story.

Frequently asked questions

Are these books available in English?

Yes for most. Epics of Hope, The Fragments of a Lost Soul, Kaur’s Worlds, and Negotiate Good, Negotiate Well are all in English. La hija del Ganges, Las dos caras de la luna, Los mundos de Kaur and Sabores e historias de mi cocina india are in Spanish; La hija del Ganges also has an English edition (Daughter of the Ganges) in print.

Can I find these in Barcelona bookshops, not just Amazon?

Asha Miró and Raimon Panikkar are widely stocked given their long publishing history here; the newer independently-published titles are more reliably found online. Ask your local biblioteca to order a copy if they don’t stock it — Catalan public libraries do this on request.

Do any of these authors do events or talks in Barcelona?

Asha Miró appears regularly on Catalan television and cultural programming; Manu Kaur has presented her novel at literary events across Catalunya, from Badalona to Vic; Kandarp Mehta teaches and speaks at IESE events. Follow our WhatsApp channel below and we’ll flag any Barcelona events or signings from this list as we hear about them.

📚 Know an Indian-origin writer based in Catalunya we missed?

Tell us what you’ve found and we’ll verify it before it goes live — real recommendations only, same rule we used for this list.

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