Akhil Katyal

Akhil Katyal is a writer and translator based in Mumbai. Katyal has published four books of poems, including The Last Time I Saw You (HarperCollins India) and Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems (Westland-Context). He was the 2016 International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa International Writing Program and was awarded the Vijay Nambisan Poetry Fellowship in 2021.

His work appears in several pivotal anthologies, including in Jeet Thayil (ed.) The Penguin Book of Indian Poets (Penguin Hamish Hamilton: 2022) and Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing (Red Hen Press: 2022).

He translated Ravish Kumar’s Hindi book of micro-fiction Ishq Mein Shahar Hona as A City Happens In Love (Speaking Tiger: 2018). In 2020, he co-edited The World that Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia (HarperCollins India).

In the summer of 2022, he guest edited a special issue on 'New Indian English Poetry' for Poetry at Sangam.

Katyal finished his PhD from SOAS, University of London in 2011, and headed the Creative Writing programme at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions at Ambedkar University Delhi for several years, before moving on to BITS Law, Mumbai where he is currently the Associate Professor of Literature.