Tishani Doshi

Tishani Doshi publishes poetry, fiction and essays. For fifteen years she worked as the lead dancer of the Chandralekha company in Madras, India, and as such, the body has been a central preoccupation in her work—a vehicle to explore gender, violence, sexuality and power, but also as an agent of renewal and transformation. Since her debut, Countries of the Body, which won the Forward Prize for best first collection (2006), she has sought to find joineries between the lyric and the political. Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (2017) headlined the All About Women Festival at the Sydney Opera House and was shortlisted for a Ted Hughes Award. Her novels, The Pleasure Seekers (2010) and Small Days and Nights (2019), have been shortlisted for the Hindu Fiction Prize, Tata Fiction Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. A God at the Door, her most recent collection of poems, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize 2021. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.