Nikita Deshpande is the winner of the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize 2023 and her poems have also been included in the anthology The World That Belongs to Us(2020). She also writes fiction and has published a novel, It Must’ve Been Something He Wrote (2016), and short stories included in the anthologies, A Case of Indian Marvels (2022), and Magical Women (2019). She was awarded a 2015 Vermont Studio Center fellowship to work on her fiction. She assisted directors on feature films Fukrey and Mirzya and wrote for the animated series Chai Chai and the documentary series The Big Day.