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Amita Basu has been writing since she could hold a pencil. Her childhood heroes were Tintin, the intrepid explorer of comic-book fame, and Sherlock Holmes, whose observational powers a writer would kill for. Amita has a passion for literary fiction, but performs occasional sallies into genre fiction and dashes back into the literary castle with newly salvaged weaponry.
 
After a brief exploration of the short form during primary school, Amita yielded to the evergreen temptation of putting the horse before the cart. Her teens and twenties were spent working on a series of unfinished epic novels. These stories, which she hopes someday to return to in more feasible form, include: Clouds, a coming-of-age novel featuring a scientist whose personal life and doctoral dissertation suffer from suspiciously similar problems; The Flat, a novel that begins with a dead artist and runs down interlinked corridors of legal, medical, and personal mysteries; and Free, a novel about the paradoxical experience of romantic love as both freeing and constraining.

​Having finally attained the age of reason in her early thirties, Amita turned to the short form. Since 2020 she has written a number of short stories, and published pieces at the micro, flash, standard, and novelette length. A lifelong lover of novels, she has learned to see in the short form an enjoyable means of cutting her teeth. She writes mostly in the contemporary literary realist mode, with occasional ventures into speculative fiction.

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​When not writing, Amita teaches undergraduate psychology. She enjoys being physically active to keep her mind relaxed and focussed. She loves classical music. Her favourite pickmeups are Beethoven’s inventive sonatas and his profound symphonies. Having fallen in love with Greek myth as a child, she’s learning modern Greek as a preparation for the more challenging but more beautiful ancient language. Amita loves getting lost in wild spaces and finding interesting things to photograph. (Top of her list are tree bark, moss, and beer bottles abandoned by adventurers in deep wilderness.)

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Want to know more?
Check out these stories & interviews...
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Interview with Amita about her soft horror/magic realist short story “The Hole” featured in Novel Noctule.
 
Speculative short story “The Why and the How” featured in Bewildering Stories’ Editors’ Choice Awards, voted best prose published that quarter.
 
Magic realist short story “Re:Birth” published in several venues, most recently Caustic Frolic.

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Photos

A goat atop a wall, navigating between embedded glass shards intended to deter climbers, en route to a tree with tasty leaves.

Moss.

Pine roots stretching just under the earth like haunted fingers.

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