Vandana Kumari Jena is a retired officer of the Indian Administrative Service. She writes novels, short stories and poems. Her short stories have been published in over twenty anthologies. Her works include two novels-The Dance of Death (2008) andClueless (2019); three collections of short stories-The Incubation Chamber (2014), The Future is Mine (2015) and One Rotten Apple and Other Stories (2018); and a collection of middles-In the Middle (2015). She lives in Mumbai.