Karthika Naïr is a French-Indian poet, playwright, fabulist and librettist. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reworking of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live Award for Book of the Year (India) and was highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes (UK). Les Oiseaux électriques de Pothakudi – her second children’s book illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet – won the 2023 Prix Felipé for “ecological children’s literature”, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Jugendliteraturpreis. A Different Distance, renga co-written with the American poet and translator Marilyn Hacker, is her latest collection.
The performances she has scripted and co-scripted include Urja Desai Thakore’s ROOH: Within Her; PETTEE: Storybox with novelist Deepak Unnikrishnan; Carlos Pons Guerra’s Mariposa, a queer reimagining of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly; and Akram Khan’s multiple-award-winning DESH, whose central, animated sequence adapts her book The Honey Hunter.
Naïr is the co-founder of choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s dance company, Eastman. In 2012, she also blueprinted the biannual Prakriti Excellence in Contemporary Dance Awards (PECDA) for Prakriti Foundation, a unique initiative for dance in the Indian Subcontinent, and she remained its artistic director across four biannual editions.
About the book in focus
A Different Distance: A Renga (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.
Book
A Different Distance: A Renga (Milkweed Editions, 2021)
When
January 2025
Where
Kerala Literature Festival, 2025