Neha Dixit

In this Indian name, the name Dixit is a patronymic, and the person should be referred to by the given name, Neha.

Neha Dixit
Neha at Jaipur Literature Festival 2025
Citizenship	India
Alma mater	Miranda House, Jamia Millia Islamia
Occupation	Journalist, author
Website	nehadixit.in

Neha Dixit is an Indian independent journalist and author based in India. She has over 18 years of experience in long form, investigative reportage with a focus on intersections of gender, politics, and social justice, in multiple mediums including online, print, and television.

She has been awarded over a dozen awards including the Chameli Devi Jain Award (2016) as well as CPJ International Press Freedom Award (2019).

Early life and education

Neha attended school in Lucknow, and graduated in English Literature from Miranda House, University of Delhi. Thereafter, she pursued a Masters in Convergent Journalism from the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Milia Islamia in New Delhi.

Career

Neha began her career as an investigative journalist with Tehelka, before switching to the Special Investigation Team of India Today. Since 2012, she has been a freelancer. Her works have been published in The Wire, Al Jazeera, Outlook, The New York Times, The Caravan, Himal Southasian, and The Washington Post among others.

She has investigated and exposed a wide range of human rights violations including extrajudicial killings by police, hate crimes, human trafficking involving right wing Hindu fundamentalist organisations, clinical trials on the marginalised by big pharma and sectarian majoritarian violence in South Asia. She has also written political profiles and looked at intersections of gender, class and caste under majoritarian governments.

Notable reports and awards

In August 2014, Dixit detailed the circumstances faced by seven rape survivors of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. This won her the 2014 Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism and the 2015 Press Institute of India-Red Cross award.

In 2016, Dixit chronicled (for Outlook) the abduction of 31 girls from Assam by a Hindu nationalist organization to infuse them with "nationalist ideologies" — a criminal defamation suit was subsequently filed against Dixit, in what was condemned by Committee to Protect Journalists as a tool of intimidation. The same year, she was conferred with the Chameli Devi Jain Award, the highest honor for women journalists in India: her meticulous nature of coverage and cross-checking of involved facts were admired in particular.

In 2018, she reported on poor Indians, who were unethically drawn into participating in illegal drug-trials by pharma giants. In 2019, Dixit documented a range of extrajudicial killings by police forces in Uttar Pradesh and other states, getting threats from high-ranked police officials, in the process. Her reports prompted a note of concern by Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The same year, she received the CPJ International Press Freedom Award.

She has been a visiting faculty at Ashoka University, MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia University, NALSAR, Hyderabad, IIMC and others.

Books

In 2016, Neha was one of the first Indian journalists to use a graphic format for reportage. She contributed a story "The Girl Not from Madras" to the comic book anthology 'First Hand: Graphic Non-fiction from India', about the exploitation of women in India.

She contributed a chapter on Sexual violence during sectarian violence in India to 'Breaching the Citadel, an anthology of sexual violence in South Asia 2016 by Zubaan Books.

She wrote the piece, 'Outcast[e]/Outlawed: The Bandit Queen (1996)' for the book ‘Bad’ Women of Bombay Films: Studies in Desire and Anxiety published by Palgrave Macmillan. Details the history of desire and anxiety underlying the cinematic representation of the modern Indian woman.[1]

The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian

On 14 August 2024, Dixit's first non-fiction book, 'The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian' published by Juggernaut Books was launched in Delhi. The book looks at the last three decades of Indian socio-political and economic turmoil through the eyes of an urban poor, migrant, working-class woman and her family.

The book was published in UK, Ireland, Australia and other commonwealth countries on May 1, 2025 by Footnote Press, an imprint of Bonnier Books.

The book looks at the last 30 years of India through the eyes of a working-class, migrant Muslim woman in Delhi who becomes a part of the cheap female labor economy and works over fifty different jobs in three decades without once getting paid a minimum wage. Researched for close to a decade, it is a portal to a messy world hidden away from elite Indians. It is the story of untold millions and asearing account of urban life in New India.

It has been translated now in four languages: Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi.

The book was selected as the book of the year 2024 by The Hindu and the Deccan Herald. It won the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman award, 2025 and Kalinga Literary best debutaward, 2025 for this book. The book also received an Honorable Mention by the CG Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing in 2026.

“Through an examination of one woman’s life, The Many Lives of Syeda X tells the story of the invisible people in India who are the backbone of society. Dixit immersed herself in Syeda’s life for many years while researching the book. The result is an immensely readable work of narrative non-fiction that draws the reader into Syeda’s life and family, as she navigates ingrained hardships that have affected generations of those at her level of society in the world’s largest democracy.” – Honorable Mention, The Jury, CG Moore Prize in Human Rights Writing 2026

‘Neha Dixit is awarded the Ramnath Goenka Sahithya Samman for Best Debut for The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story fan Unknown Indian, a work of grave moral attention and disciplined reportage. Through the life of an unnamed woman, Dixit traces the quiet yet enduring fortes of gender, poverty and institutional power that govern contemporary Indian existence.

Written with restraint, empathy and investigative clarity the book restores dignity to a life rendered invisible by neglect and silence. It resists facile resolution, allowing contradiction and complexity to speak in their own register. By revealing how an individual life bears the weight of larger social truths, The Many Lives of Syeda X enlarges the ethical and narrative scope of son fiction, marking a distinguished and consequential literary debut.’ –Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman, Best Debut, 2026

‘One might imagine that it doesn’t get harder than being poor and uneducated, a Muslim and a woman in today’s India. This unique biography of a brave and tenacious woman worker in the unorganized sector shows how the state, through its fitful acts of heavy-handed regulation, makes it much worse. She tries many things and masters them, but just when it looks like her economic life has turned a corner, the state steps in to fix some problem that it should not have permitted to arise in the first place, and her job and hope are gone. An important and eye-opening work.’ – Abhijit V. Banerjee, Economist, Noble laureate

It was also shortlisted for Atta-Gallata Award, Kerala Literature Festival and Auther Award.

She received the New India Fellowship in 2017 for this book driven by long research and narrative journalism. It tells the story of an impoverished Muslim migrant family in India's capital, negotiating the pitfalls of politics and economic servitude, holding up a mirror to the shadows behind the sheen of "New India."

John Reed reviewed the book for Financial Times and wrote:'Ahead of the book’s launch, publicists were comparing it to Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012), her chronicle of life in a Mumbai slum. However, Dixit goes one step further by zooming out and providing a historical sweep...Dixit's book is a vivid and memorable account of how post-economic reform in India works. It is a trenchant and invaluable people's history of the bottom of the pyramid in the world's most populous nation.'

Umar Khalid reviewed the book for 'The Wire' from Tihar jail. He wrote, 'Dixit’s conceptual clarity is remarkable and her prose lucid, and she writes with deep empathy for the people. She constructs a virtual social history, or history from below, reminiscent of the flavours one gets while reading the works of old British Marxist historians like E.P. Thompson or Eric Hobsbawm.

Dixit reminds us that a journalist’s job is not to act as an amplifier for the establishment’s propaganda, but to bring into focus the people and issues that are conveniently invisibilised and disregarded.'

Rahul Jacob wrote in the Mint Lounge, 'There will likely not be a better book of gritty Indian reporting for years to come-and certainly none that takes contemporary Indian economic myth-making to task as The Many Lives of Syeda X poignantly does.’

Priya Ramani wrote that it is 'the invisible India book everyone must read.'

Priavi Joshi wrote in the Scroll.in, 'The book is a testament to what fine journalism promises to be – rich, complex, empowering the forgotten, and capable of capturing the zeitgeist.'

Ruben Banerjee wrote in The Federal that 'The story that Dixit ends up writing is a paean to the grit and gumption of the untold millions adrift on despair in urban India, narrated without condescension. The book is also as much a testimony to the author’s bottomless commitment to narrate and document real stories of a mass of real and unsung people that should really matter.

Prathyush Parasuraman wrote in the Frontline, 'To read the journalist Neha Dixit's The Many Lives Of Syeda X then is to see life invade storytelling in one of the most thrilling Marxist texts. It is The Great Indian Marxist Book, a journalist's account of one woman traced from the early 1990s to the present day, from the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 to the Delhi riots of 2020, threading through 50 different types of jobs...Dixit produces not a protagonist but instead a historical subject.'

Soutik Biswas writes in the BBC: "Ms Dixit’s book shines a spotlight on the invisible lives of India’s neglected female home-based workers."

Urvashi Butalia wrote, 'it is a book that is a remarkable, quiet, and yet devastating account of an ordinary woman’s life...In setting Syeda’s life, and that of the people around her, against these larger developments, Neha Dixit also skilfully weaves in the larger story of ‘India’ and the complexities of “modernity”, attentive all the time to what modernisation means for the poor and vulnerable. And yet, unlike so much writing about the poor, Dixit is never patronising.

...Indeed, her restrained, unadorned prose, does not turn her characters into victims, or indeed gloss over their ‘flaws’. Instead, she brings a storyteller’s skill to her characters who, within the space of a few spare lines, become real people, oppressed, exploited and yet, able to sometimes negotiate with power, and other times defeat it by just stepping away and, on rare occasions, confront it (as Syeda does when she joins a union), vent their anger at it, and win the battle...

...It is precisely for this quietness, this matter-of-factness, this simplicity and truthfulness that this book must be read. It offers those of us who live with privilege, a mirror to the casual cruelty and indifference towards those less privileged, that informs our lives.'

Personal life

Dixit is married to Nakul Singh Sawhney, an Indian documentary filmmaker.

Dixit has been charged with "inciting hatred" by the Government of India, a move that has been criticized by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Because of her reporting, she has been subjected to threatening calls and an attempted acid attack and a break attempt in her house.

Year	Award
2025	Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman (Best Debut)
2025	Kalinga Literary Award (Best Debut)
2020	One Young World Journalist of the Year
2019	International Press Freedom Award 2019, Committee To Protect Journalists
2019	23rd Human Rights Press Awards, Hong Kong Press Association
2019	Special Mention, ACJ Award for Investigative Journalism
2017	Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Woman Journalist
2015	PII-ICRC Award for Best report on Humanitarian Subject
2014	Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism
2013	UNFPA-Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity. Best Investigative Feature
2013	Trust Women Honorary Journalist of the Year, Thomson Reuters Foundation
2013	Thomson Foundation-Foreign Press Association Young Journalist Award
2012	Best TV News reporter, News Television Awards
2011	Lorenzo Natali Prize for Journalism, Asia-Pacific Region
2010	News Television Award for Best Investigative Feature
2010	UNFPA-Laadli Media Award for Best Investigative Feature
2009	Anupama Jayaraman Memorial Award for Young Women Journalists

External links

• Neha Dixit on Twitter