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Tishani Doshi is an award-winning poet , novelist and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent, born in Madras, India, in 1975. She received her master's in writing from the Johns Hopkins University in America and worked in London in advertising before returning to India in 2001 to work with the choreographer Chandralekha, going on to perform with her on many international stages.
She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 2001. In 2006, she won the All-India Poetry Competition, and her debut collection, Countries of the Body (Aark Arts, 2006), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second poetry collection, Everything Begins Elsewhere, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2012. Her third, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2018 in the UK and for the poetry category of the 2019 Firecracker Awards in the US. Her fourth poetry collection, A God at the Door (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her fifth, Egrets, While War, was published by Bloodaxe in 2026 and is on the shortlist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2026.
Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers (Bloomsbury, 2010), was longlisted for the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Hindu Fiction Award, and has been translated into several languages. Fountainville: new stories from the Mabinogion was published by Seren in 2013. Her second novel, Small Days and Nights (Bloomsbury, 2019), was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize.
An avid traveller, she has been trekking in the Ethiopian Bale Mountains, visited Antarctica with a group of high-school students, and documented the largest transgender gathering in Koovakam. She has written about her travels in newspapers such as The Guardian, International Herald Tribune, The Hindu and the Financial Times.
Tishani Doshi lives on a beach between two fishing villages in Tamil Nadu with her husband and dogs. She is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
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