Short Fiction

Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize 2024

Win a Free Entry to the Desperate Literature Prize 2024

Five lucky Indian writers can win sponsored entries for the Desperate Literature Prize 2024.

Identity: Vol. 7 of the Helter Skelter Anthology of New Writing

VOLUME 7 of the Helter Skelter Anthology of New Writing features original short fiction and poetry from India, selected by Mridula Koshy and Sumana Roy.

No Visible Wound

Helter Skelter is a proud partner of the Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction. This story by Mariana Roa Oliva was one of the final shortlisted entries for the prize in 2022.

A Certain Degree of Ownership

Helter Skelter is a proud partner of the Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction. This…

The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories by Nisha Susan

The Triangle

An excerpt from The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories by Nisha Susan.

A Pursuit

The light turned green and Annie discovered that keeping up with a man in possession of such powerful buttocks was not an easy task.

Sumana Roy

Missing

Sumana Roy’s debut novel Missing is a study of the modern marriage, played out against the awareness of the question: what happens when a wife goes missing? Read an excerpt from the book here.

Meghna Pant

Unknown Husbands

New husbands are like burrs: they stick, they irritate, and they’re mostly unwanted.

Ghosts at a Contested Funeral

Ghosts at a Contested Funeral

Our feelings are second-hand. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs are coloured, our originality validated through artificial art. It has become truly difficult to love without getting hurt.

The Ballard Engine

The Ballard Engine

Right before the end, reality had become a bad sci-fi movie, the kind you watch at four in the morning, unable to sleep, unable to turn the T.V. off.

Forgetting by Devashish Makhija

Butterflies on Strings

The Maoists aren’t a ‘tribe’, though some of them might be tribals. The C.R.P.F. certainly isn’t. Which tribe hunts for a monthly salary?

Chandrakala, illustration by Newman D'Silva

The Groom and the Dog

It was the summer before her final year of college when Vaidehi first saw Suresh Babu.