WORD THURSDAYS – NANDINI BHATTACHARYA

Nandini Bhattacharya (Houston, TX) was born and raised in India and has called the United States her second continent for the last thirty years. Love’s Garden, published in 2020, is her first novel, and a work of women’s historical fiction in a tumultuous twentieth-century India. Her work has been published or will be in the Saturday Evening Post , The Bombay Review, The Bangalore Review, Storyscape Journal and more. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and been accepted for residencies at the Vermont Studio Center. She was first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest (2017-2018), long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize (2019 and 2020), and received Honorable Mention 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, Jose Saramago, Salman Rushdie, and last but not least, Chimamanda Adichie. She lives outside Houston, Texas, and teaches English Literature and Writing at Texas A&M University.