Nish Hegde is a London-based writer and essayist, and graduate of the Universities of Edinburgh and Melbourne.
His literary work centres around themes of queerness, youth and the identity of immigrants, for which he draws from his own history of growing up throughout India, England and Wales. His writing encompasses poetry, flash fiction, and short stories, and he is currently working on his first novel, Little Blasphemies.
Read some of his work below:
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Excerpt: Little Blasphemies
WINNER: Book Edit Writers’ Prize
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.
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Flash Fiction: Hindustani Lyric
(TOP 6% ENTRY): The Bridport Prize
The Emergency gripped India, but no-one rushed in our little town, where we bunked school and let the juice of mangoes carve rivers between our greedy knuckles. You were class topper, so Amma encouraged our friendship and Appa resented our comparison.
Dust could not settle in the air by that lake, its surface raw like jute, so it felt like the right place to tell you secrets.
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Short Story: On the Night Stand
I’ve blown too many Tories to really believe they’re special any more. Still, I expected the Housing Minister might spring for somewhere nicer than a West London Travelodge: so much for parliamentary standards. Then again, I was a “replaceable whore” - an escort - so I wasn’t supposed to know about that sort of stuff.
‘Not bad, Thomas,’ he growled. It was such a politician’s trait, to deliberately use a person’s name. It was supposed to make me feel special. It mostly just annoyed me. Anyway, my name wasn’t really Thomas, so I instead refocused myself on the task at hand. After all, I was on the clock.
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Essay: Sailing Through the Dark
WINNER: Insight Writing Prize
We possess neither the ability nor the technology to perfectly know everything about our world, and yet find ourselves with no choice but to navigate it, directed only by fragments of information that we use to illuminate and infer the path ahead — as though sailing a ship through the ocean guided only by the stars.
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