Mona Arshi

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Mona Arshi.jpg
Arshi in 2019
BornLondon, England
OccupationPoet, novelist, and lawyer
LanguageEnglish
NationalityBritish
Education Lampton Comprehensive School
Alma mater University College London
University of East Anglia
Notable worksSmall Hands (2015), Somebody Loves You (2021)
Notable awards Manchester Poetry Prize 2014
Forward Prize for Poetry, Best First Collection (2015)
Website
www.monaarshi.com

Mona Arshi is a British poet and novelist. She won the Forward Prize for Poetry, Best First Collection in 2015 for her debut collection, Small Hands. She has also won the Manchester Poetry Prize. Her debut novel, Somebody Loves You, was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize.

Contents

Biography

Arshi was educated at Lampton Comprehensive School and grew up in an Indian Sikh family from Punjab in Hounslow. [1] [2]

She studied at Guildford College of Law and University College London and the London School of Economics (LSE), where she obtained a master's degree in human rights law in 2002. She trained as a solicitor in the civil liberties law firm JR Jones Solicitors. [1] She then worked for several years as a litigator at the NGO Liberty [3] acting on high-profile judicial review cases including Diane Pretty's "right to die" case, [4] asylum destitution cases and death in custody cases. [5]

Arshi began writing poetry in 2008. After taking some poetry classes at City Lit, she went on to study for an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of East Anglia, gaining a distinction in 2010. [6] [1]

She lives in West London. [7]

Writing career

While studying for her MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Arshi won the inaugural Magma poetry competition for her poem "Hummingbird" and was a winner in the Troubadour International Competition (2013) for her poem "Bad Day in the Office". [1] Arshi was then selected for The Complete Works mentoring programme, funded by the Arts Council. [6] In 2013, The Huffington Post named her one of "Five Poets to Watch". [8] In 2014, she was joint winner in the Manchester Poetry Prize competition with a portfolio of five poems. [9] [10]

In 2015, she published her debut collection of poems Small Hands with Pavilion Poetry, a new poetry imprint from Liverpool University Press under the editorship of poet and critic Deryn Rees-Jones. [11] The collection includes an elegy sequence for Arshi's brother, Deepak, who died suddenly in 2012, as well as poems inspired by her small children and poems about her own childhood on Hounslow. [12] [13] [6] The book won the Forward Prize for Poetry, Best First Collection in 2015. [14] [15] Poems from the collection were published in The Guardian [16] and The Sunday Times . [17] Her poem "This Morning" appeared on posters across the London Underground, as part of the British Council's "Indian Poems on the Underground" project in 2017. [18]

Arshi went on to judge the Forward Prize for Poetry in 2017 [19] and hosted the Awards with Andrew Marr at the Royal Festival Hall. Arshi has also judged the Magma Poetry Competition [20] and the Outspoken Poetry Prize. [21] She also judged the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2017. [22]

In 2017, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Arshi's commissioned poem "Odysseus, The Patron Saint of Foreigners?" [23] In 2018 she was asked to read at the First Stuart Hall Public Conversation. [24]

Arshi's second collection, Dear Big Gods, was published in April 2019, also by Pavilion Poetry. This collection continues to address her brother's death [25] and to experiment with form, with prose poems, a sestina and a tanka, and includes poetic responses to Lorca, Emily Dickinson, The Odyssey and The Mahabharata. [26] [27] The title poem and an essay, "On Gods, Human Rights and the Poet", were published in the US magazine POETRY [28] in 2019. In the essay, Arshi comments: "A poem is not a human rights instrument or the pleadings in a court case, nor should it seek to be but one activity that the human rights lawyer and poet share is the restless interrogation of language....Poetry needs to continue to strive to make space for itself and think the unthinkable, the unimaginable on the page."

In 2021, Arshi's debut novel, Somebody Loves You, was published by And Other Stories. Set in suburban London, it tells of a British Indian family whose younger daughter, Ruby, develops selective mutism. [29] [30] In 2022, it was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize [31] and the Goldsmiths Prize [32] and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize [33] and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. [34] The novel was named book of the week in The Telegraph and This Week magazine.

Arshi was a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 2022 to 2024. [35] [36] She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. [37]

Works

Poetry

Novel

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Mona Arshi". The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  2. ↑ "Waking up language(s); translating birdsong/poetic alchemy in Cley". Future and Form. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  3. ↑ "Mona Arshi". John Hewitt Society. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  4. ↑ Rozenberg, Joshua (31 August 2001). "Judge backs right-to-die woman's legal challenge". The Daily Telegraph. ISSN   0307-1235 . Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  5. ↑ libadmin (5 March 2003). "Historic alliance of refugee & housing groups in Court of Appeal: Asylum Act benefits cut is degrading". Liberty Human Rights. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  6. 1 2 3 "Mona Arshi". The Asian Writer. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  7. ↑ "Mona Arshi". And Other Stories. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  8. ↑ Peake, Robert (26 December 2013). "5 British Poets to Watch in 2014". HuffPost. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  9. ↑ "Manchester Writing Competition 2014". Manchester Metropolitan University. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  10. ↑ "Mona Arshi named joint-winner of Manchester Writing Competition for Poetry". New Writing. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  11. ↑ Farrington, Joshua (22 October 2014). "LUP to launch contemporary poetry series | The Bookseller". www.thebookseller.com. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  12. ↑ "Forward First Collections Reviewed – #1 Mona Arshi". Martyn Crucefix. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  13. ↑ "Small Hands (Shortlisted for the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection)". Dundee Review of Literature. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  14. ↑ "Claudia Rankine's 'exhilarating' poetry wins Forward prize". BBC News . 29 September 2015. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  15. ↑ Sharma, Sarika (3 October 2015). "Sikh woman's debut anthology of poems wins prestigious UK award". The Times of India . Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  16. ↑ Guardian Staff (3 October 2015). "The Saturday poem: The Lion". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  17. ↑ "Phone Call on a Train Journey by Mona Arshi (born 1970)". The Sunday Times. 6 September 2015. ISSN   0956-1382 . Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  18. ↑ "Indian Poems on the Underground - Literature". literature.britishcouncil.org. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  19. ↑ "Congratulations to the Forward Prize winners". The Poetry Society. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  20. ↑ "Interviews – Magma Poetry" . Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  21. ↑ "Prize for Poetry". Outspoken. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  22. ↑ Manchester Metropolitan University. "Manchester Writing Competition 2017, Manchester Metropolitan University". Manchester Metropolitan University. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  23. ↑ "BBC Radio 4 - The Odyssey Project: My Name Is Nobody, Series 1, Odysseus, the Patron Saint of Foreigners?". BBC. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  24. ↑ "Stuart Hall Foundation". Periscope. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  25. ↑ "'Sis, you gotta let go': on Mona Arshi's 'Dear Big Gods'". Martyn Crucefix. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  26. ↑ "Book review: The gods amongst us". The Poetry Society. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  27. ↑ "The best recent poetry – review roundup". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  28. ↑ Poetry Foundation (3 April 2019). "Mona Arshi". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  29. ↑ "Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi review – talk is cheap". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  30. ↑ "Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi review: this gorgeous debut novel is a lesson in sensitivity". The Telegraph. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  31. ↑ "Jhalak Prize 2022 shortlists announced". Books+Publishing. 20 April 2022. Retrieved 28 April 2022.
  32. ↑ "The Goldsmiths Prize 2022". Goldsmiths University of London. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  33. ↑ "Introducing the Desmond Elliott Prize longlist 2022". National Centre for Writing. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  34. ↑ "Republic of Consciousness Prize Longlist 2022". London Review Bookshop. Retrieved 12 May 2022.
  35. ↑ "The Master and Fellows October 2022". Issuu. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  36. ↑ "Annual Record 2022" (PDF). Trinity College Cambridge. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  37. ↑ "Mona Arshi". Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
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