Tarun Krishnamurthy author page
1 puzzle by Tarun Krishnamurthy
with Constructor comments
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Hey, Crossworld! I'm a 16-year-old rising senior in high school based in Seattle, WA. I have been constructing for roughly a year, and I am thrilled to publish my New York Times debut and be on the list of teenage constructors! Besides constructing crosswords, you can find me playing percussion instruments and listening to dubstep music.
I first became fascinated with crosswords in late 2022 after stumbling upon a video of the final round of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Having always enjoyed puzzles like mazes and word searches since an early age, I found crosswords to be the perfect new challenge. After solving a few and perusing various crossword sites like XWord Info, I was surprised to find that many other constructors like Jeff Chen and Sarah Sinclair live here too, which gave me even more motivation to be a part of this growing crossword community in my hometown.
The motivation for this Times puzzle's theme arose from another puzzle published in 2023 that utilized a similar concept called grammagrams—words or phrases that can be phonetically expressed as a sequence of letters. I wanted to go further and then settled on C-N-M-N-E, or SEA ANEMONE. I assumed there would be a huge list of theme entries that I would have to slog through, but the theme was pretty tight, so it all worked out. And with 59 theme squares, the puzzle surprisingly filled cleanly, with two bonus down answers that I appreciate.
I am grateful to the editing team for keeping the fill the same and retaining most of the clues. I am especially glad for HOLI to be featured as I am an Indian-American. I hope I can include more references to my cultural background in my future puzzles.
I hope you enjoy the crossword!