Tishani Doshi | Granta

Tishani Doshi

Tishani Doshi publishes poetry, essays and fiction. Her most recent books are Girls are Coming Out of the Woods, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for poetry, and a novel, Small Days and Nights, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. For fifteen years she worked as a dancer with the Chandralekha Group in Chennai. Her fourth full-length collection of poetry, A God at the Door, has just been published by Bloodaxe Books. She is a visiting associate professor at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and otherwise lives in Tamil Nadu, India.

Photograph © Carlo Pizzati

Tishani Doshi on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Breast or Tooth?

Tishani Doshi

‘A breast just casually hanging around, being a functional exocrine gland, enjoying the sun? Impossible.’

Tishani Doshi on women’s rights in India.

Poetry | Issue 151
Poetry | Issue 151

Tissue

Tishani Doshi

‘Even if you could walk through the corridors / of your body, you would not know which rooms / to enter, which were full of stone.’

Poetry | Issue 151
Poetry | Issue 151

Self

Tishani Doshi

‘We all want to be / monuments but can’t help shoving our fingers / in dirt.’

Poetry | Issue 151
Poetry | Issue 151

Collective

Tishani Doshi

‘If you need proof you’re alive, regard the oar / in your hand.’

Poetry | Issue 151
Poetry | Issue 151

Nation

Tishani Doshi

‘Understand friend, the conscience is a delicate broth. / Sometimes it feels good to be bad.’

Poetry | Issue 151
Poetry | Issue 151

Species

Tishani Doshi

‘Will it be for them / as it was for us, impossible to imagine oceans where there are now / mountains?’

Poetry | Issue 151
Poetry | Issue 151

Cosmos

Tishani Doshi

‘Remember when we were / young and the end was a black hole at the edge of forever, / a million light years away.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 151
Essays & Memoir | Issue 151

Sixteen Forever

Tishani Doshi

Tishani Doshi on #MeToo, Anand Jon Alexander, and being sixteen in Chennai, India.

In Conversation | Issue 151
In Conversation | Issue 151

In Conversation: Tishani Doshi and Karthika Naïr

Tishani Doshi & Karthika Naïr

‘I have never felt it as a poet, and that is why I’m doubly grateful to dance, for having experienced the loneliness and the terror of the empty stage, but also, to have had that live connection.’

Poetry | Issue 130 padlock
Poetry | Issue 130 padlock

Rain at Three

Tishani Doshi

‘Rain at three splits the bed in half, / cracks at windows like horsemen blistering / through a century of hibernation.’

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