Karthika Naïr is a poet, fabulist and librettist whose books include The Honey Hunter/ Le Tigre de Miel (illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet), which later became the grandmother’s tale in Chotto Desh. Until theLions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reimagining of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tate Literature Live Award for Book of the Year (Fiction), was shortlisted for the Atta Galatta Prize (India), and highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes (UK).
Her latest poetry collection, A Different Distance (Milkweed Editions, December 2021), renga written with American poet Marilyn Hacker, was a Ms. Magazine Recommended Read for Fall 2021 and an Indie Next Selection for December 2021. Naïr’s poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals like Granta, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Magazine, Poetry International, Indian Literature, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets and the Forward Book of Poetry 2017. She is a 2012 Sangam House Fellow, a 2013 Toji Foundation Fellow, and was awarded a Villa Marguerite Yourcenar Fellowship in 2015.
Also a dance enabler, Naïr worked in prominent Parisian public theatres and museums (musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Centre national de la danse, Cité de la musque…) before joining forces with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet. She is executive producer of their works such as Babel (Words), Puz/zleand L