About

Author Bio

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, and reviewer. She is a Contributing Editor at PopMatters. Her literary translation of Dhumketu’s best short stories will be out in December 2020 with HarperCollins India. Her debut short story collection, Pros & Cons: Stories, will be out with 7.13 Books in September 2020.

Her writing has won Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories nominations and reached the finalist stage for the 2017 Best of the Net Anthology. Her non-fiction has appeared or is upcoming in, among others: The Atlantic, BBC, Literary Hub, Longreads, The Millions, PopMatters, Scroll.in, The National Book Review, and more. Her fiction has been published in Amazon’s Day One Literary Journal, Gravel Magazine, Lunch Ticket, Hofstra’s Windmill, Eleven Eleven Journal, Hot Metal Bridge, Jet Fuel Review, Kweli Journal, Five:2:One, The Indian Quarterly, York Literary Review (UK), The Nottingham Review (UK), Litro UK, The Vignette Review, etc. One of her essays was published in an anthology, Sulekha Select: The Indian Experience in a Connected World.

Having lived and worked her way around India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the US, she now splits her time between Atlanta, Georgia, USA and Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Find her at: http://indiatopia.com and at http://twitter.com/jennybhatt.

Contact via this form for a quick response.

Welcome.

Hi there. I’m Jenny Bhatt — a writer and a global nomad of Indian origin.

Indiatopia began as an attempt to reclaim and reframe the India where I was born, spent my formative years, and which will always be a part of my evolving diasporic identity even as I continue moving across countries and continents and assimilating various other cultures. That said, this space has developed into a scrapbook of my own version of Indiatopia — one that is more about a personal mindset rather than about being tied to a physical place. For more, see the ‘Introduction‘ and this ‘Recalibration‘. Also, my own thoughts on the question of an “Indian identity”: Part 1 and Part 2.

Mostly, I write about reading and writing. Check out the following while you’re browsing around here:

— my fiction and nonfiction published in various literary magazines (print and online)

— reviews (books, TV, movies, plays, music, artwork)

— a monthly series of the best short stories I’ve read online

— a monthly series on my favorite writing how-to books/resources

— a monthly series on journaling (with prompts)

— a non-academic appreciation of poems from around the world

— a 6-part series on bibliomemoirs

I also share almost-daily shorter things (mostly about books, reading, writing) on Twitter daily. And a quote for the day on Instagram. Join me there if you like.

So welcome. Stay awhile. Share your story. Start a conversation.