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"  An intriguing novel, one that is also in dialogue with the quiet exclusions that structure everyday life, Shashank Gupta's Bloodhive is dark and eerily lyrical.  The narrative, which blends myth and reality, is an intense introspection on the themes of violence, desire, and faith. Gupta's Didoli is both terrain and moral sensorium, shaping as well as responding to the destinies of Yaga, Patho, and Kurchen, whose stories are at once intimate and communal. While the events at the beginning of the novel portray disability as passive vulnerability, the narrative subsequently reframes disability as a complex agentic force, and disability identity as a site of both epistemic insight and active political agency, a disruptive force rather than a tragic reality."

Professor Banibrata Mahanta, Department of English at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) | Varanasi

Shashank Gupta

Shashank Gupta writes as a listener before he writes as a maker, attentive to what a community repeats, what it edits out, and how language can turn fear into something portable, then “true.” Born in 1965 into a farming family in post Independence India and trained in horticulture, he learned early that labour does not guarantee yield, that weather and law and isolation can undo the most patient work. A horticultural way of seeing runs through his fiction: long cycles, rot alongside bloom, pruning as an ethics of power, barrenness and fertility as social weather rather than decoration.

At thirty he moved to Bombay and entered advertising, first as a proofreader and then a copywriter, later rising to creative director, a position he has held for over two decades. After his father’s death in 2002, he began writing with sustained intensity. His novels include Pimp, Visitors to the House, and Four Chimneys, and much of his work returns to Didoli, a recurring hill town shaped by fog, superstition, and social hierarchy, a place where tenderness and violence coexist and where moral fracture feels like weather.

His forthcoming novel Bloodhive, due 15 February 2026, opens with three deaths and a note offering a refrain clean enough to carry, “a bird came down from the night.” As the line circulates, explanation hardens into verdict, and fear takes on the force of policy.

Gupta lives in Delhi with his wife, the artist Priyanka Choudhary.