Pritha Bhattacharyya is a Bengali-American fiction writer, teacher, and reader. She is a 2024 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Humanities and Ethics at McGovern Medical School.
Her work appears in The Southern Review, Ecotone, Ninth Letter, Nashville Review, Bodega, Apogee Journal, and elsewhere, and has received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology.
She received her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow. She received her MFA from Boston University, where she was awarded the Leslie Epstein Global Fellowship to travel to Osaka, Japan. Her work has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Willapa Bay AiR, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA), Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Inprint Houston, Tagore Society of Houston, and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. She is the recipient of the 2024 Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award from the Key West Literary Seminar, the 2023 Inprint Joan and Stanford Alexander Prize in Fiction, and the 2022 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction. In 2019, she was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers, a second runner-up for the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship, and a semifinalist for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. She is a staff member for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
Pritha grew up in Northern Virginia and earned her BA in Psychology from Cornell University. In her free time, she enjoys watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, salsa dancing, sending Snoop Dogg memes, and befriending stray cats in Houston.