NANDINI BHATTACHARYA
ABOUT NANDINI
I was born and raised in India, but I’ve called the United States my second continent for the last thirty-five years. As you see, I do not call either place “home,” because it is that question of where “home” is that my writing, dreaming, and searching are all about. Maybe it’s in books and art, though, because wherever I’ve lived, I have generally turned to them for answers to life’s big questions.
In other news, I’m a writer, Professor of English, public speaker, reviewer, and blogger. My first novel Love’s Garden (2020) garnered critical praise as “a fascinating and well-crafted journey into India's complex past” (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni), and “a sprawling family saga set against a background of some of the most momentous events of twentieth-century Indian history” (Clifford Garstang). Shorter work has appeared or is forthcoming in River Styx, Rumpus, Notre Dame Review, Oyster River Pages, Sky Island Journal, Bangalore Review, Raising Mothers Journal, the Saturday Evening Post Best Short Stories 2021, Funny Pearls, Bombay Review, PANK, and more.
Writing is hard and solitary, and writers are sometimes poor (though I categorically won’t call the writing life–as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes called much human life–“nasty, brutish, and short”), but I’ve had the luck to enjoy literary community at the Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, VONA, and the Centrum and Ragdale Artist Residencies, and most joyously at the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers, of which I am an alumna. I teach Literature and Creative Writing at Texas A&M University, and there I enjoy another community of fiercely dedicated writers and readers. With all this luck and support, my second novel, Something of Me in You–about love, caste, colorism, and violent religious fundamentalism in India, and racism and xenophobia in post-Donald Trump America–is contracted with Ghosh Literary Agency and under submission. I am working on two other novels about the mysteriousness of family and mysterious families.
Visit me at Amazon, Author’s Guild, X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn; Goodreads; Substack; Medium; and my Blog.
Happy coming home to reading!
