"Hasdeo Arand: Mine is the Voice” was first published in Our Freedoms (Juggernaut Books India, edited by Nilanjana S. Roy, 2021)

Karthika Naïr is a poet, playwright, fabulist and dance librettist. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reworking of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live Award for Book of the Year (Fiction). Les Oiseaux électriques de Pothakudi (Electric Birds of Pothakudi) – illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet – won the 2023 Prix Felipé for ‘ecological children’s literature’, and was shortlisted for the Jugendliteraturpreis the same year. 

Naïr’s poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals like Granta, LARB, Poetry Magazine, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, the Forward Book of Poetry 2017 and the forthcoming Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent Poets. A Different Distance, renga co-written with the American poet and translator Marilyn Hacker, is her latest collection.  

The performances Naïr has scripted include Urja Desai Thakore’s ROOH: Within Her (2024); PETTEE: Storybox (2024) with novelist Deepak Unnikrishnan; the play Beneath the Music directed by Jay Emmanuel (2023); Carlos Pons Guerra’s Mariposa (2022), a queer reimagining of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly; and several of Akram Khan’s award-winning dance pieces, like Until the Lions (2016), adapted from a chapter of her own book.