Mayukh Sen

The Climb

Food writing at Food52 gave Mayukh Sen an early structure for a practice that has since expanded into biography and essay. That formative stretch sharpened attention to nuance, texture, and the social life of food. From there, Mayukh Sen’s work moved beyond recipes as isolated objects and toward the people and histories that gather around them. The result is writing that can hold intimacy, politics, and context at once.

Today

At New York University in New York, Mayukh Sen teaches food journalism as an adjunct professor while continuing to write. That mix keeps reporting and teaching in direct contact, with each informing the other. Mayukh Sen approaches food as a lens rather than a closed subject, using it to examine people and the culture around them. In that frame, a profile becomes a way to track identity, power, memory, and belonging, and food writing becomes a form of reportage with broader social reach.

Signature

Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star sits at the center of Mayukh Sen’s signature work. The title points to the territory he works in most directly: biography, cinema, South Asian identity, and the recovery of lives that have not always been given full attention. In that book, as in the rest of Mayukh Sen’s writing, the method is careful framing and close attention to the person at the center.

In Their Words “What I’ve tried to reflect in my work is the truth that food is much more than an object for consumption. It is a window into so many imbalances within American society.” Those lines describe a practice that treats food as a point of entry and profiling as a method. Mayukh Sen uses both to make room for complexity, while keeping the cultural meanings of food tied to the lives it touches.

Recognition

Mayukh Sen’s honors include James Beard MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award nomination (2019), James Beard Award for Profile Writing (2018), National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography finalist, and IACP Award nomination. These recognitions track a body of work that has carried across forms and audiences through precision, curiosity, and sustained attention to food as part of a larger social world.