Poets Highlighted in Annual Article on Indian Writing in English in ‘Literature, Critique, and Empire Today’ (2025)

Seven of our poets have received special mention in the short introductory article compiled by Payal Nagpal and Shyamala A. Narayan for ‘Literature, Critique, and Empire Today’. An annual undertaking, each installment provides an overview of published writing from India in, or translated into, English with this issue spotlighting publications in 2024. The comments on our books are shared below.

‘In her debut work Patchwork Quilt Sunaina Jain chooses her own path rather than follow the goal posts set by the world — “You looked for precision and detailing;/ I longed for creative freedom…”’

‘Poems in Lola in Belfast by Pallavi Padma-Uday, document her experience as a lonely immigrant moving from New Delhi to Belfast and her near-fatal experience due to Covid — “It’s not berries, but the colour of blood clotting/ on my tongue, so pungent I must be dead/ to lick the wound but I do.”’

‘In Arun and Sunitha’s Harbour Eyes most poems are, in the words of the poets, “Insta length, Tweet breadth”.’

‘In Vyshnavee Diwakar’s Delphic Diatribes each poem is an experiment in form. The book includes ballad, triolet, senryu, lanterne, couplet, concrete poetry, rispetto, tyburn, a collum lune or the American haiku and many others. In the tyburn poem, “Shelling,/ stilling,/ swelling,/ spelling,/ sent out just for spelling “stilling” wrong,/ sadness sobs a swelling, shelling song.”’

‘In Renditions, Subhakar Das, poet from Assam, expresses the conflict and violence in the North-east — “Spare a thought for/ the wife waiting at home,/ the children crying for their father./ What of those/ who shot him dead?”’

‘Sritama Sen’s debut There Used to be a Lake Here Once, subtitled, “Chapbook of a Bengali Queer” is written from the point of view of a trans non-binary poet and the poems are deeply personal. One poem written as an “Ode to Katrina Kaif” — “I lie in bed/ sinful and diseased./ in class, I lie about having a crush/ on your boyfriend instead.”’