Bio

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, and educator. She has taught creative writing at Writing Workshops Dallas and the PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship Program. Her story collection, Each of Us Killers, won a 2020 Foreword INDIES award. Her translation, Ratno Dholi: Dhumketu’s Best Short Stories (US edition: The Shehnai Virtuoso), was shortlisted for the 2021 PFC-VoW Book Awards. One of her short stories was included in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2021. Her fiction has been published in several other anthologies too.
Her nonfiction has been published in various venues including NPR, The Guardian, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, The Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, Dallas Morning News, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Star Tribune, and more. She resides in the Dallas, Texas area and is currently a PhD student of literature at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Project Description

To support the translation of the novel Crossroad by Varsha Adalja from Gujarati. Adalja (b. 1940) is one of the most prolific and celebrated writers from the coastal state of Gujarat in Western India, publishing more than 45 books, including novels, short stories, essays, and works of drama. Published in 2016 and considered her magnum opus, Crossroad is nearly 600 pages, spans from the 1920s to '70s, and covers India's freedom from the British Empire. The multi-generational story follows a family of women from Lakhtar, a small Gujarati village, as they navigate rapidly changing gender expectations and seek their own emancipation. With more than 56 million speakers, Gujarati is the third-most spoken language in the South Asian American diaspora, yet only one Gujarati-to-English literary translation has been published in the U.S.—a collection of short stories by Dhumketu also translated by Jenny Bhatt.