Ashutosh Bhardwaj is a bilingual journalist, fiction writer and literary critic. He experiments with prose in various forms and genres.  

As a journalist, he has traveled across Central India and documented the conditions of tribes caught in the conflict between the Maoist insurgents and the police. He has investigated encounter killings, cases of political corruption and electoral malpractices. He is the only journalist in India to have won the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism for four consecutive years.  In 2015, he was shortlisted for the Reuters’ Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism.

He has published five books: a story collection, Jo Frame Men Na The; a book of essays on literature and cinema, Pitra Vadh; a creative biography of Dandakaranya, The Death Script, and its Hindi version Mrityu Katha; a co-edited volume with the French academic Judith Misrahi-Barak on the Indian perspective of the 19th century migrations from India, besides several other stories, diaries, travelogues and critical essays.

Shortlisted for Tata Lit Fest 2020 award and Kamaladevi Chhattopadhya award, and winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2020 Atta Galatta award, The Death Script has already appeared in several Indian languages. Its UK edition has been published by Holland House. 

Pitra Vadh has received the prestigious Devi Shankar Avasthi Samman for the year 2020 awarded to the best work of literary criticism.  

He has received the Krishna Baldev Vaid Fellowship for his innovative fiction and was a writer-in-residence at the Sangam House in Bangalore, 2012-13. 
As a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 2017-19, he wrote a monograph, Women in Solitude, a study of solitary women in select novels and cinema. 

He was a writer-in-residence at Kafka House, Prague in 2023.