Bio

Nikita Deshpande is an author, poet and screenwriter.

 

She made her fiction debut with the novel It Must’ve Been Something He Wrote (Hachette), and has short stories published in the anthologies A Case of Indian Marvels (Aleph), Magical Women (Hachette) and Grandpa Tales (Scholastic). She received a Vermont Studio Center fellowship to work on her fiction in 2015. 

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Nikita won the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Osmosis Poetry Prize in 2025 and 2026. Her poetry has been featured on Poets.org's Poem-A-Day, Only Poems, The Rumpus, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and the anthology The World That Belongs to Us (Harper Collins), among others.
 

After assisting directors on feature films like Fukrey and Mirzya, she went on to write for Chai Chai, an animated series streaming on Amazon Prime in the US, and The Big Day, a documentary series on Netflix.