Nazia Akhtar teaches courses in Indian and Russian literatures at IIIT, Hyderabad. She received grants from the Charles Wallace India Trust and has held fellowships with the New India Foundation and the Akademie Schloss Solitude to write two books on a long tradition of Urdu writing among women in Hyderabad. Her translation of Zeenath Sajida’s Urdu short story “Chhotam Jaan” received a commendation from the jury of the Jawad Memorial Prize (2021). Bibi’s Room: Hyderabadi Women and Twentieth-Century Urdu Prose (2022) was her first book, and her second book, The Deccan Sun: Essays and Stories by Zeenath Sajida (2025), consists of translations of Urdu writings.