Nandini Bhattacharya was born and raised in India and has called the United States her second continent for the last thirty years, and might be looking for the third one, which could be Odyssean. Wherever she has lived, she has generally turned to books for the answers to life's questions, big or small (that includes philosophy, recipes, and continents to call home). Her first novel Love's Garden was published in October 2020. Her work has been published or will be in Notre Dame Review, Oyster River Pages, PANK, Sky Island Journal, Saturday Evening Post Best Short Stories, Good Cop/Bad Cop Anthology (Flowersong Press), Gardan Anthology of the Craigardan Artists Residency, Funny Pearls, Bombay Review, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, Storyscape Journal, Raising Mothers, Bangalore Review, 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, among others. Her awards include first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest, a finalist for the Fourth River Folio Contest for Prose Prize, long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize, a finalist for the Reynolds-Price International Women's Literary Award, and Honorable Mention for the Saturday Evening Post Great American Stories Contest. She has finished Homeland Blues, a second novel, about love, caste, colorism and violent religious fundamentalism in India, and racism and xenophobia in post-Donald Trump America and is repressented by Ghosh Literary. Her favorite authors include Jhumpa Lahiri, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, Danya Kukafka, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Salman Rushdie, Jose Saramago, Chimamanda Adichie, Esi Edugyan, and Voltaire. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Texas A&M University. Her fields of expertise are Creative Writing, Postcolonial Studies and Colonial Discourse Analysis, World Literatures, South Asia Studies and Indian Cinema, Women's and Gender Studies, Film, Diaspora, Migrations and Exiles, Travel writing, and Affect Theory. She has published three scholarly books on these subjects, the latest being Hindi Cinema: Repeating the Subject (Routledge 2012).
Selected Works
There is NOTHING Lady Prem Mitter, unhappy wife of Indian baronet Sir Mitter in Calcutta in the 1920s, won't do to protect the abandoned daughter of her dead childhood friend. When she's asked to step in to protect the child of an Englishwoman with a mysterious connection to her husband, though, can she cope? Diverse stories of family and women's lives in modern India ruled by the British unearth an older secret in Lady Mitter's past, a secret that holds the key to her life and loves during the most turbulent times in British-ruled India.