Author of
A Different Distance (Milkweed Editions, 2021)
Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (Archipelago Books, 2019)
French-Indian, poet-dance producer and curator, Karthika Naïr is the author of several books, including The Honey Hunter, illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet and published in English, French, German and Bangla.
Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata is her reimagining of the Mahabharata in multiple voices. It won the 2015 Tata Literature Live! Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the 2016 Atta Galatta Prize for Fiction. Choreographer Akram Khan adapted the Amba/Shikhandi chapter of the book into a dance show, also called Until the Lions, winner of the 2016 Tanz Award for Outstanding Production. Another adaptation of the book, this time for opera, is also on the cards for 2020. She was also the principal scriptwriter of the multiple-award-winning DESH (2011), choreographer Akram Khan’s dance solo and its family show-version; Chotto Desh (2015).
Karthika’s poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals across the world, including Granta, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Review (UK), The Literary Review (USA), Poetry International, Indian Literature, The Wolf, 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 also awarded a Villa Marguerite Yourcenar Fellowship in 2015.
Karthika Naïr
Books by Karthika
Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (Archipelago Books, 2019)
Karthika Naïr refracts the epic Mahabharata through the voices of nameless soldiers, outcast warriors and handmaidens as well as abducted princesses, tribal queens, and a gender-shifting god. As peripheral figures and silent catalysts take center stage, we get a glimpse of lives and stories buried beneath the dramas of god and nation, heroics and victory - of the lives obscured by myth and history, all too often interchangeable. Until the Lions is a kaleidoscopic, poetic tour de force. It reveals the most intimate threads of desire, greed, and sacrifice in this foundational epic.
"The thirty haunting, heartrending chapters, in a wide range of forms and styles, resonate powerfully with one another...Women whose names are known from the Sanskrit epic but whose character and inner experience are muted there suddenly come to life as full-blooded people caught up in the destruction endemic to a male world." — David Shulman, New York Review of Books
"Naïr, in nearly three hundred pages of connected poems, reimagines the story of the Mahabharata as the lions’ story, giving a voice to nineteen of its characters and allowing them each to tell their own account ... Employing poetic structures including the canzone and the obscure French form rimas dissolutas, among many others, Naïr deftly shifts from one voice to the next." — Bibi Deitz, Bomb
"I am astounded by the personalized shifts with which Karthika stamps her voice on the Mahabharata, so tender, fierce and visionary. It's a liberating experience to be dissolved into what Amjad Nasser called "the ten metaphors of poetry," so to speak, between grief and love, ecstasy and despair, meaning and nonsense." — Fady Joudah, Shelf Awareness
“John Dryden famously spoke of translation taking three forms: metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation. Though written in English, Karthika Naïr's Until the Lions certainly fits this last category. Her feminist take on the Mahabharata, India’s great epic, is an astonishing demonstration of the power of translation to reshape and renew the literature of the past.” — Edwin Frank, in Words Without Borders
"The Mahabharata, the larger of India’s two epics, was composed roughly 2,000 years ago...In reading Naïr’s book, I felt as if I had scratched the surface of a palimpsest (the epic) and discovered a room teeming with three-dimensional living souls...Until the Lions adds a brilliant new thread to this rich literary tapestry." — Harvard Review
"Has been rightly hailed as a magnum opus by the critics." — Wasafiri
"The Mahabharata will always take you back to the deepest existential questions. It continues to instigate superlative writing as well. Karthika Naïr's Until the Lions is an unshakable masterpiece of modern poetry, one of the great retellings of the text." — Indian Express
"Naïr's intervention -- a series of dramatic monologues that give the epic's women psychological depth, wrath and despair -- is brilliantly executed. — Times Literary Supplement
"Until the Lions is a triumph of narrative and poetic risk-taking. Five years in the making, Nair's collection of poems, written in the voices of women in the Mahabharata, has been rightly hailed as a magnum opus by critics." — Aditya Mani Jha, Wasafiri
PRAISE
A Different Distance (Milkweed Editions, 2021)
In March 2020, France declared a full lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Shortly thereafter, poets and friends Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr—living mere miles from each other but separated by circumstance, and inspired by this extraordinary time—began a correspondence in verse.
Renga, an ancient Japanese form of collaborative poetry, is comprised of alternating tanka beginning with the themes of tōki and tōza: this season, this session. Here, from the “plague spring,” through a year in which seasons are marked by the waxing and waning of the virus, Hacker and Naïr’s renga charts the “differents and sames” of a now-shared experience. Their poems witness a time of suspension in which some things, somehow, press on relentlessly. Between “ten thousand, yes, minutes of Bones,” there’s cancer and chemotherapy and the aches of an aging body. There is grief for the loss of friends nearby and concern for loved ones in the United States, Lebanon, and India. And there is a deep sense of shared humanity, where we all are “mere atoms of water, / each captained by protons of hydrogen, hurtling earthward.”
At turns poignant and playful, the seasons and sessions of A Different Distance display the compassionate, collective wisdom of two women witnessing a singular moment in history.
“As a time capsule for the pandemic, A Different Distance captures how healing it can be to hold each other close in times of distress.”—NPR Morning Edition
“A renga naturally lends itself to a spare profundity, and in Hacker and Naïr’s able hands . . . the enormity of the poets’ emotions and experiences are deeply rendered and strike so very close to home, as intended.”—Angela María Spring, Washington Independent Review of Books
“The poems bear witness to what many people experienced, cities shut down and radical changes to daily life . . . This book of poetry preserves a written record of the shared human experience COVID-19 forced upon us, forever altering our lives.”—Booklist