Tishani Doshi – författare

Escaping her failing marriage in the United States, Grace Marisola has returned to Pondicherry to cremate her mother. Once there, she receives an unexpected inheritance—a house on the beaches of Madras—and discovers an older sister she never knew she had: Lucia, who has spent her life in a residential facility. Grace’s attempts to leave her old self behind prove first a struggle, then a strain, as she discovers the chaos, tenderness, fury, and bewilderment of life with Lucia.

August, 1968: Babo Patel arrives in London from Madras, with curly hair, jhill mill teeth and dreams of becoming a success. When he meets the beautiful, auburn-haired Siân Jones, he falls in love instantly. She, like him, is in search of something bigger than what the home she left behind can offer.But when Babo's parents learn of his intention to marry ‘some girl from God knows where' he is given an ultimatum: he can only marry Siân if they agree to live in Madras for two years before returning to London. As the years pass by, the calamities, quirks and heartaches of first love, lost innocence, and old age unfold across cultures and generations of this mixed-up family in a topsy-turvy world.

Shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize 2020‘An astonishing novel that is beautifully written but underpinned by a quiet simmering anger about injustice and unrealistic expectations of a family – and of life in contemporary India’ Peter Frankopan‘A shattering study of disaffection and belonging … This is a concise novel of staggering depth …Disturbing, deep and utterly extraordinary’ Bidisha, ObserverAn Irish Times Book of the Year 2019Escaping her failing marriage, Grace has returned to Pondicherry to cremate her mother. Once there, she finds herself heir to an unexpected inheritance. First, there is the strange pink house, blue-shuttered, out on a spit of the wild beach, haunted by the rattle of fishermen in their catamarans. And then there is the sister she never knew she had: Lucia, who has spent her life in a residential facility.Soon Grace sets up a new and precarious life in this lush, melancholy wilderness, with Lucia, the village housekeeper Mallika, the drily witty Auntie Kavitha and an ever-multiplying litter of puppies. Here in Paramankeni, with its vacant bus stops colonised by flying foxes, its temples and step-wells shielded by canopies of teak and tamarind, where every dusk the fishermen line the beach smoking and mending their nets, Grace feels that she has come to the very end of the world. But Grace’s attempts to play house prove first a struggle, then a strain, as she discovers the chaos, tenderness, fury and bewilderment of life with Lucia. Luminous, funny, surprising and heartbreaking, Small Days and Nights is the story of a woman caught in a moment of transformation, and the sacrifices we make to forge lives that have meaning.

Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods is an unflinching collection of poems that weave between topics from violence against women to time and memory. Tishani Doshi's third full collection in English blends visceral power with artistic elegance, re-imagining form as it sifts through detail and emotion. It followed two earlier, highly praised collections, Everything Begins Elsewhere, published by Bloodaxe in 2012, and her debut, Countries of the Body, winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Tishani Doshi was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2018 for Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods and for her accompanying dance performance of the title poem. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her fourth collection, A God at the Door, was published in 2021.

An exquisite collection from a poet at the peak of her powers, Tishani Doshi's Forward-shortlisted A God at the Door spans time and space, drawing on the extraordinary minutiae of nature and humanity to elevate the marginalised. Extending the territory of her zeitgeist collection Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, these new poems traverse history, from the cosmic to the quotidian. There is a playful spikiness to be found in poems like 'Why the Brazilian Butt Lift Won’t Save Us', while others, such as 'I Found a Village and in it Were All Our Missing Women', are fed by rage. As the collection unfolds, there are gem-like poems such as 'I Carry My Uterus in a Small Suitcase' which sparkles on the page with impeccable precision. Later, there are the sharp shocks delivered by two mirrored poems set side by side, 'Microeconomics' and 'Macroeconomics'.Tishani Doshi's poetry bestows power on the powerless, deploys beauty to heal trauma, and enables the voices of the oppressed to be heard with piercing clarity. From flightless birds and witches, to black holes and Marilyn Monroe, A God at the Door illuminates with lines and images that surprise, inflame and dazzle.

Egrets, While War is a lyric field guide to grief and resilience, where attention becomes a form of devotion, and intimacy, a quiet resistance. The poems in Tishani Doshi’s fifth collection navigate the deep entanglements between environmental loss, ancestral memory, the slow transformations of ageing, and the devastations of war. Birds appear throughout these pages, not simply as subjects but as symbols and messengers, witnesses to war, extinction and exile. Mythic birds from the Ramayana fly alongside city pigeons and wild peacocks, forming a living archive of flight and disappearance. Here, love and desire emerge not as consolation, but as a form of radical presence – one of the last ways we remain tethered to the world. With lyric clarity and a gaze both wide and precise, Egrets, While War becomes a meditation on survival – of species, of history, of the heart.Tishani Doshi's previous collection, A God at the Door, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.

Fountainville is a strange, lonely town on the edge of everywhere. But the place has its own healing secrets, as revealed by Begum, the Lady of the Fountain, and her assistant Luna, and under their care the town flourishes. But when the mysterious Mr Knight arrives at their house of 24 women, everything begins to change.Tishani Doshi was born in Madras in 1975 to Welsh-Gujarati parents. She has written for the Guardian, the New York Times, Vogue and Elle. Her poetry collections are Countries of the Body, winner of the Forward Prize (Tranquebar, 2006; ISBN 9788189975852) and Everything Begins Elsewhere (Bloodaxe, 2012; ISBN 9781852249366). Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers (Bloomsbury, 2011; ISBN 9781408809839), was longlisted for the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary award.

In this, her first poetry collection since the award-winning Countries of the Body, Tishani Doshi returns to the body as a central theme, but extends beyond the corporeal to challenge the more metaphysical borders of space and time. These new poems are powerful meditations born on the joineries of life and death, union and separation, memory and dream, where lovers speak to each other across the centuries, and daughters wander into their mothers’ childhoods. As much about loss as they are about reclamation, Doshi’s poems guide us through an ‘underworld of longing and deliverance’, making the exhilarating claim that through the act of vanishing, we may be shaped into existence again. Everything Begins Elsewhere was followed by two further collections, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods in 2018, and A God at the Door in 2021.