Jayant Kashyap is an India-based[4]poet. He is the author of three pamphlets, including Notes on Burials, for which he won the Poetry Business New Poets Prize in 2024. In 2025, he received a Toto Award for Creative Writing.
Kashyap began writing poetry in 2012,[7] and has been publishing actively since 2017,[8] but his work was first noticed in the following year, with his poem 'From Bletchley With Love' winning in the Bletchley Park poetry challenge on The Poetry Society's Young Poets Network.[9] Since then, he has published work in popular journals such as Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Poetry London, New Welsh Review,[10]Poetry Northwest,[11] and Wasafiri.[12] Yashasvi Vachhani, writing about a set of poems published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, observes that "the reader does not even realise when they step out of their own skin to merge with the bird on the page."[13]The Bombay Literary Magazine also published Kashyap's poem about his namesake Jayanta, son of Indra, which Aswin Vijayan, the magazine's associate poetry editor, noted as an introduction of his "crow into the tradition of crows in anglophone Indian poetry", alongside the work of such poets as Arun Kolatkar.[14]
Kashyap, who has worked as a ghostwriter,[15] has also translated poetry, including in response to a challenge organised by Young Poets Network and Modern Poetry in Translation in 2021.[16]
Acclaim
Poet Julie Sampson praised Kashyap's "ability to match emotion with poetic-skill".[17] In 2021, his poem 'A Positively Violent Poem in Five Parts', the second prize winner in the Poems to Solve the Climate Crisis challenge on Young Poets Network,[18] was exhibited at COP26, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference.[19][20] The UK Department for Education-commissioned Education Nature Park project's KS4 'Poetry and nature' resource features this poem.[21] In an essay titled 'Planetary precarity in performance ecopoetry: Poems to solve the climate crisis?' the author Jan Rupp notes Kashyap's poem for its "disjointed, multiperspectival account." Rupp says:
"Right from the start, Kashyap's poem pre-empts any idea of easy solutions. Even the young activists must realize that they are implicated in a complex web of human-nature relationality, where replacing swimming pools with trees will not simply restore nature and climate action must be negotiated collectively. [...] As text and performance, this negotiation and collaboration of climate activism – importantly extending beyond the page as the reader navigates a fragmented poetic score – is a process that Kashyap's poem helps engender and move forward, capitalizing on the pragmatics and poetics of performance ecopoetry."[22]
Another article on ecopoetry noted Kashyap's poem as "a good example of how a sophisticated structure can be combined with deep thought."[23]
In May 2021, his poem '’Twas a long summer of thin air' was the Ink Sweat & Tears Pick of the Month, with Kate Birch mentioning the poem as having "depth, beauty and nuance".[24] He later won the Young Poets competition at the Wells Festival of Literature for his poem 'Earth, Fire', selected by the poet Phoebe Stuckes.[25] In 2022 and 2023, his work was praised by the Young Poets Network in partnership with the Portland Japanese Garden[26] and Suffolk's Britten Pears Arts.[27] In June 2023, in her Introduction of the Plumwood Mountain Journal's issue titled 'The Transformative Now', guest editor Kristen Lang mentioned his work having the capability to become a "part of the tapestry of a given time."[28] The same year, Kashyap's poem 'Nilgai' received an honourable mention in the Dan Veach Prize for Younger Poets at the Atlanta Review.[29]
Kashyap received the New Poets Prize in 2024,[30] and a Toto Award for Creative Writing in 2025.[3] He was also selected as an Acumen Young Poet in 2025,[31] and is the only India-based winner of both the Wells Festival of Literature's Young Poets competition and the New Poets Prize.
Longer works
Kashyap's debut pamphlet Survival was published by Clare Songbirds Publishing House in 2019 and the second, Unaccomplished Cities, by Ghost City Press in 2020. Vic Pickup, in her review, praised the latter for "revisiting key points of trauma in human history".[32]
After previous shortlistings (2021, '22),[33] he was awarded the 2024 Poetry Business New Poets Prize for his third pamphlet Notes on Burials, selected by the poet Holly Hopkins.[34] This collection of nineteen poems "that treat language as a living site"[35] was noted as a "witness to our greed as a race and the destruction [...] we leave behind",[36] and the Yorkshire Times described it as an "outstanding" collection "travers[ing] borders to encompass both the poet's own experience and the multiplying eye of his focus."[37][38] The pamphlet was praised by The Madrid Review, who placed it "alongside the work of Seamus Heaney and Anne Carson",[1] and was Atrium Poetry's featured publication for the months of January and February in 2026.[39] The poet Rebecca McCutcheon praised it as a "collection that invites rereading",[40] and Alice Kate Mullen, in the PBS Bulletin, called it a "worthy and thought-provoking winner".[41]
Cover of Kashyap's Notes on Burials
Kashyap also published a limited-edition zine Water with Skear Zines in 2021. It was hailed as "a call to attention."[42] In an interview by Cheryl Moskowitz, Kashyap noted the Anthropocene as the period when humans can decide what the Earth looks like "in the future."[43] His essay, titled 'Writing Water, and on Its Need to Be Written About', was later published in The Mersey Review.[44]
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