Nandini Bhattacharya

Nandini was born and raised in India and has called the United States her second continent for the last thirty years. Wherever she's lived, she's generally turned to books for the answers to life's question, big or small (that includes philosophy and recipes). Her short stories have been published or will be in the Saturday Evening Post Best Short Stories from the Great American Fiction Contest Anthology 2021 (forthcoming 2021), the Good Cop/Bad Cop Anthology (Flowersong Press, 2021), the Gardan Anthology of the Craigardan Artists Residency, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, Storyscape Journal, Raising Mothers, The Bangalore Review, OyeDrum, and more. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Workshop and been accepted for residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, VONA, Centrum Writer’s Residency, and the Ragdale Artist’s Residency (forthcoming), among others. She was first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest (2017-2018), a finalist for the Fourth River Folio Contest for Prose Prize (2018), long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize (2019 and 2020), a finalist for the Reynolds-Price International Women's Literary Award (2019), and a finalist for the Saturday Evening Post Great American Stories Contest, 2021.

She’s currently working on a second novel about love, minorities, racism, and Hindutva politics in India and xenophobic mentalities and other mysteries in Donald Trump's America, titled Homeland Blues. She loves (and reads) Jhumpa Lahiri, Megha Majumdar, Amitav Ghosh, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Salman Rushdie, and last but not least, Chimamanda Adichie. She lives outside Houston and serves a marmalade cat.