Niya Shahdad

Niya Shahdad was born in Bombay. After studying English and Art History at Tufts University and later completing an editorial internship at Harper’s Magazine, she moved to Srinagar, Kashmir. The troubled, desired valley of Kashmir, where she originates from and eventually returned to, is also the place of her beginnings as a writer. It is where she has spent the nascent years of her life and work as a writer, in pursuit of a voice while discovering, anew, its layered field of conflict, politics, history, and suffering. Her findings have been defined by the complex, symbiotic relationship between inhabiting this space and simultaneously meeting it on the page as the construction of her mind and voice. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, and The Indian Express, amongst other publications. She is currently working on her first book.