Writer, Podcaster, Essayist, Mess.
Nish is a London-based writer and graduate of the Universities of Edinburgh and Melbourne.
His writing encompasses poetry, essays about economics, flash fiction, and short stories.
He is currently editing his debut novel, Little Blasphemies, an excerpt of which won The Book Edit Writers’ Prize.
His work explores themes of identity, social position, and self-discovery with a dark and incisive voice. His friends have summarised this fiction as being about ‘depressed people taking drugs and being gay.’
Other Work and Awards:
His work has received recognition from a number of writing competitions including:
The Book Edit Writers’ Prize
The New Writers Flash Fiction Competition
The Bridport Prize
The Insight Writing Prize
Read more of his work here.
Little Blasphemies:
Nish is currently editing his debut novel, Little Blasphemies, and open to discussions on representation:
It doesn’t count as a love triangle if it’s between your drug dealer and your therapist, and if you’re committing to lesbianism you probably shouldn’t keep sleeping with your ex-boyfriend: those are the lessons in Little Blasphemies, a sharp and dark coming-of-age story about two queer students navigating friendship, identity, and self-acceptance in contemporary Edinburgh.
Alternating between the third-person perspectives of a dissociated Eli and the first-person anxiousness of naive fresher Anjali, this novel charts their stumbles through toxic relationships, identity and family expectations as the two unlikely friends confront the secrets they’re afraid to share–even with themselves.
With themes of sexuality, race, gender and class on either side of the thin line that separates self-destruction and self-discovery, Little Blasphemies offers a fresh take on the messy realities of young adulthood and asks if we can ever truly grow up without first confronting what holds us back over the course of a completely ordinary, and therefore completely extraordinary, year in their lives.
An excerpt of Little Blasphemies won the Book Edit Writers’ Prize. Read it below, or get in touch to request a full synopsis or larger excerpt.
Eli Baker was depressed, and his solution was to have sex with as many strange men as he could find. Following this line of logic, he found himself in a large bedroom in Leith, playing someone else’s guitar, wearing nothing but his black boxer briefs, and taking huffs from a pipe filled with crystal meth.
It was an otherwise uneventful Tuesday.
— Excerpt from Little Blasphemies
The Cusper Club
Nish is co-host of The Cusper Club, a podcast about the experiences of young people ‘on the cusp’ between being a millennial and Gen Z. In it, he and his co-host Hannah Goldsmith discuss the latest in culture, relationships, music, literature and more.