Best-selling Indian-Australian author, disability advocate, keynote speaker, and multi-award winner, Nandita Chakraborty was born in Kolkata, India in a small conservative family that has always been associated with the Arts. Her father Dhiresh Chakraborty won many accolades in Indian cinema; his film In Search of Famine was the first Indian film in a regional language to win the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1980.
Along with her siblings, she was sent out to boarding school at the age of seven in the hills of Meghalaya, India. A few years later the family settled in New Delhi, where she attended Sri Venketeswara University to study Political Science by day, and at night attended a Fashion & Visual Merchandising school. In her third year in college, she pursued a Diploma in Visual Merchandising, leaving behind any career in political science. Nandita began working with a well-known designer in India, but it still didn’t leave her creatively satisfied.
In 2000 she moved to Melbourne where she started her own fashion boutique, but later went on to work in banking. It was not until 2008 she decided to do a short course in creative fiction writing at RMIT Melbourne, however it was not until 2012 after an accident she would utilise her writing as a career path.
In 2011, Nandita fell 40 metres while rock climbing acquiring a traumatic brain injury. After several months in rehab, she continued working but in 2016 she was back in rehab. She acquired a disability that cannot be seen, called an invisible disability of the brain.
Known as the ‘Accidental Writer’ for her successful novellas Meera Rising and Rosemary’s Retribution, written after her accident, the novellas were the product of her therapy rehab in 2016- 2017. Both novellas were finalists at the International Book Festival 2018 and American Book Fest. Nandita as a writer now identifies herself as a Neuro-Divergent Artist. Her latest novel, her memoir Dirty Little Secrets, reached 22 in the top 35 in India and Top 10 of Editor’s choice at Delhi Wire, featured in various magazines in Australia and India.
Last year she became the winner of Honouring Women in Merri-bek Awards 2022. In 2023 Nandit won the Silver Trophy at the Global Stevie Awards, Women in Business, as the Social Change Maker of the year for Disability. She won Highest Commendation in the Access and Inclusion Awards 2023, and was a Finalist at the Arts & Culture Awards at the Australian South Asian Centre. Nandita has also just been announced by SBS Australia as recipient of the Victorian Multicultural Award for Excellence in the Arts 2023, which formally recognises people who have fostered cross-cultural understanding, and supported those with migrant, refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds to fully participate in all aspects of Australian life.
Nandita has written for Green Room award-winning theatre director Priya Srinivasan, wrote for projects with Back-to-Back Theatre, and is working with doco-feature filmmaker Amiel Courtin Wilson as Impact Campaign Partner for his latest film Man on Earth. Living in Melbourne, Australia, Nandita is a feature writer for Melbourne’s leading Indian newspapers G’day India, while also doing a postgraduate degree in Film & TV. Her short film Brush Strokes was a semi-finalist at the New York International Screenplay Awards and the Los Angles International Screenplay Awards.
In 2023, Dirty Little Secrets won her the Best Female Writer in Mumbai India, at the Yatha Katha International Film & Literature Festival. The memoir novel was also selected by the Counihan Gallery to showcase her ‘Two Worlds Collide’ as part of a visual exhibition in the gallery’s summer show, ‘A Climate for Change’, a book to gallery exhibit.
