The Welsh-Indian poet, dancer and writer talks about the realities of life for women in Tamil Nadu and her hit poem Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
In the late 1990s the Welsh-Indian writer Tishani Doshi was on a postgraduate writing course at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. A literary scout came to visit and asked to meet her. “This was not long after The God of Small Things,” she recalls. “Everybody was looking for the next Arundhati Roy.” The scout was pretty direct. “He said: ‘You’re a poet. But you should be writing novels.’ I was actually quite offended. And dismayed that the publishing industry just wanted to re-order and replace. I had no plans then to write fiction. In fact, years later, when I wanted the larger canvas a novel can provide, I eventually did. But that instinctive loyalty to poetry never left me. I had discovered this thing and wanted to figure out how to do it. How to be a poet. I’m still attempting how to figure it out.”
Doshi’s loyalty was soon repaid. Her debut book, Countries of the Body, won the 2006 Forward prize for best first collection. Her first “proper” public poetry reading – as opposed to bookshop audiences swelled by “blood or friendship”, as she once put it – was at the Hay festival that year. She was on stage in front of 1,200 people, reading alongside Seamus Heaney and Margaret Atwood. “It was pretty stellar,” she laughs. “But that is the great thing about poetry. One minute you’re doing that and the next you’re reading to five people in a basement. And both events are always worthwhile.”
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