Nishant Batsha is the author of the forthcoming novel A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart (ecco/HarperCollins, 2025). Set between California and New York at the dawn of World War I, A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart is an expansive and intimate story of love, revolutionary ambition, and intellectual rebirth—all drawn from a lost American history.
His first novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation (ecco/HarperCollins) was a finalist for 2023 Lambda Literary Award, longlisted for a 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and named one of the best books of 2022 by NPR. It also won Honorable Mention in the prose category of the 2024 Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Book Awards.
He is currently at work on a third novel, tentatively titled A Superfluous Man. The writing of this manuscript has been supported by a 2024 grant from The de Groot Foundation.
Nishant holds a PhD in history from Columbia University and is a former Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. He lives in Buffalo, NY with his wife and two children.