Tishani Doshi
Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing
Affiliation: Visiting
Education: BA Queens University; MA Johns Hopkins University
Research Areas: Poetics of embodiment; intersections between language, movement, and sound; performance and the body; public and hybrid forms (essay, fiction, performance); ecopoetics and ecology in poetic practice; ancient and indigenous poetic texts as ecological worldviews; writing in the Anthropocene; intergenerational myth, archive, and oral traditions
Tishani Doshi is a Gujarati-Welsh writer, who grew up in Madras (now Chennai), India. She publishes poetry, fiction, and essays, and for fifteen years was the lead dancer with the legendary Indian choreographer Chandralekha. Her work often explores the body as a site of gender, power, and transformation.
Her debut poetry collection, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection (2006). Her third collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (2017), was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and inspired a solo dance piece which continues to be performed internationally. A God at the Door, her most recent collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize 2021. Her latest choreography, Nyāsa, premiered at the Sharjah Biennial in 2025.
Doshi is the author of two acclaimed novels, The Pleasure Seekers and Small Days and Nights, both translated widely and recognized for their exploration of hybridity, belonging, and identity. She also adapted a medieval Welsh myth into a contemporary fable, Fountainville.
Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Granta, The National, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Corriere della Sera, and others. She has received awards and fellowships from the Forward Foundation, the UK Arts Council, Art OMI, and the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and has served on juries for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Forward Prize, and others.
Doshi has delivered keynotes and performances around the world, including at the Sydney Opera House, the Sorbonne, and over fifty international literary and arts festivals. She was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
Her fifth poetry collection, Egrets, While War, will be published in 2026.