Nalini Paul

Nalini Paul is a widely-published poet based in Glasgow and has lived in Scotland for most of her adult life. Having grown up in Vancouver, Canada, memories of that vast landscape often linger in the margins of her work. Born in India, she has no living memories of the place, but her childhood is tinged with an ‘otherness’, an awareness of her origins being from ‘somewhere else’. She devoted these themes to her PhD thesis on Jean Rhys (University of Glasgow, 2008) and enjoys challenging fixed notions of race and belonging. Her first pamphlet, Skirlags, was shortlisted for the Callum Macdonald Award in 2010. She worked as George Mackay Brown Writing Fellow in Orkney from 2009-10, where her love of the outdoors was indulged through writing workshops with the RSPB and archaeologists. She has collaborated with visual artists, musicians and dancers (Orkney traditional and Indian classical). Paul won a Tom McGrath Award and received Creative Scotland funding to develop her work in progress, Beyond the Mud Walls with Stellar Quines Theatre; which was showcased at the Traverse, Edinburgh in 2016. In 2017, she was awarded the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and spent the month of June in Grez-sur-Loing France, working on her first full poetry collection. Paul's new poems take inspiration from her varied background and from ancient Indian poetry (in translation).

Find out more about Nalini Paul on her website.