Riddhi Dastidar
Photograph: Deepika Bhardwaj
Riddhi holds an M.A in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University Delhi where their thesis explored embodiment, hybridity and psychiatric disability in women and queer persons who experienced a female-perceived childhood. She has worked with a number of nonprofits on gender, sexual violence and impunity, education and inclusion including stints with Zubaan, Vidhi Legal, Pratham Books, and Teach for India.
In their previous life, Riddhi was a molecular biologist, prior to moving to India in 2014. She holds a BSc. in Biology from the University of Waterloo and her last research stint was at the Karp Lab at Harvard-MIT's HST center, developing mesenchymal stem cell therapies for acute lung injury.
Riddhi was born in Calcutta and raised in Oman, Dubai, Canada and Boston. Their bio usually says neuroqueer as a shorthand for 'queer, nonbinary and disabled, having lived with OCD and a childhood and working life shaped by discipline and punishment for being non-normative'. Therefore her research interests are shaped by lived experiences of people whose bodies defy industrial time and normative hierarchies.
Riddhi won the 2020 TFA Award for Creative Writing for their poetry and was nominated for the 2021 Commonwealth Writers Prize for fiction. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Autostraddle, Vogue, The Baffler, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Fuller Project, Catapult, Himal Southasian, Article 14, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Helter Skelter, Harper Collins Anthology of Queer Poetry South Asia, Rattle Magazine, Glass Journal, Skin Stories, The Wire, Scroll, Business Standard, and elsewhere. She tweets and 'grams @gaachburi.
They are working on their first book of climate fiction with speculative and queer elements.
She writes a sporadic newsletter, Small Spoon at https://smallspoon.substack.com/
Contact
For queries, commissions or collaborations, you can email me at dastidar.riddhi@gmail.com or get in touch through the form below.