about

Almost Island is a space for literature that confronts or bypasses the marketplace. Founded by prose writer and poet Sharmistha Mohanty, and co-edited by poet Vivek Narayanan, the space began with this online journal. It then expanded to an international writers dialogue, held every year in New Delhi. It hopes to extend and widen this space even further in the near future, in new ways. Almost Island believes that geography lends a direction to writing, without limiting it. India is where it is based, and it is committed to the multiple inheritances alive here, and equally seeks that which is vital in literature anywhere in the world.

We would like to thank the many poets and writers who have supported us, especially in the initial years. They include Sergio Chejfec, Bei Dao, Forrest Gander, Adil Jussawalla, Anna Deeny Morales, Ashis Nandy, K. Satchidanandan, George Szirtes, Anne Waldman, and Eliot Weinberger.

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Almost Island publishes two issues a year. We are currently unable to read unsolicited submissions. If you want to receive our occasional newsletter (when new material is available on the site) please subscribe below. To contact us with questions, comments, errata, etc., please write to edit.almostisland@gmail.com

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Founder-Editor – Sharmistha Mohanty

Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of three works of prose, Book One, New Life and Five Movements in Praise. Her work pushes the boundaries of fictional prose, moving it towards the prose poem. Mohanty’s writing has been deeply impacted by the varied pasts of India, especially the most remote, and her work claims these pasts as contemporary, as a belief in time being untamed. Her writing holds the past and the now and the experimental equally, where varied elements move towards or away from each other with a great velocity and each compositional framework is created anew.

Her most recent work is a book of poems, The Gods Came Afterwards, Speaking Tiger Books, Nov. 2019. Poems from this book have appeared in Poetry, World Literature Today and The Indian Quarterly. A chapbook made from a selection of these poems appeared in 2019, from Ediciones Pen Presse. The poems have been translated by the acclaimed Argentinian poet Mercedes Roffé and Marta López Luaces.

A new book of prose poems, Extinctions, is due out in 2022.

Some links to Mohanty’s published work: Granta; Granta; The Caravan. An interview with the Indian Cultural Forum on the project of Almost Island.

Mohanty was on the International Faculty for the Creative Writing MFA at the City University of Hong Kong, from 2010-16, till the program closed down. She has also taught at the Creative Writing programme at Naropa University, set up by Allen Ginsberg.

She has held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany (2002), at Ledig House in New York (2004), had residencies at the La Napoule Foundation for the Arts in France (2004), and Yaddo, USA, 2009. Mohanty is a recipient of a Senior Fellowship from the Indian Ministry of Culture.

Mohanty was a participant in the Kochi Muziris Biennale (Dec 2016-Mar 2017), where she created a poetry, light and sound installation I Make New the Song Born of Old.

She has worked closely with the legendary director Mani Kaul on the screenplay Nazar (1990). She has been a student of dhrupad, the most ancient form of Indian classical music, having studied with rudra-veen maestro Bahauddin Dagar.

Mohanty lives in Mumbai with her husband Kabir Mohanty, a filmmaker and video artist.

Associate Editor – Somak Ghoshal

Somak Ghoshal was educated in Kolkata and Oxford, from where he holds a Masters degree in English language and Literature on a Rhodes Scholarship. He has worked in publishing and media since 2006 and currently writes on books, culture and society. He is especially interested in the literary essay, the visual arts, and Hindustani classical music.

Associate Editor – Mantra Mukim

Mantra Mukim is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English & Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. His poems and essays have appeared most recently in Magma, Caravan, Review 31, Mubi and Charles River Journal. His debut poetry pamphlet ‘Fun Republic’ was shortlisted for the Magma Prize in 2020.

Associate Editor – S. Bharat

S. Bharat is an archivist and writer, currently based at the French Institute of Pondicherry. His poems have appeared in nether, The SAARC Journal, and Mithila Review. He has also written for Scroll.in and the International Council on Archives Section on University and Research Institution Archives blog.

Associate Editor – Souradeep Roy

Souradeep Roy is a poet, translator, playwright and actor from Calcutta. He is a doctoral candidate in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. He received the Postgraduate Research Studentship at the same institution to write a dissertation on the Bengali group theatre movement. An essay from the ongoing research, on the Bengali playwright, actor and director, Ajitesh Bandyopadhyay's adaptations of Chekhov's plays has appeared in South Asian Review.

His latest creative work is an experimental part-translation, part-original play-text, titled A Brief Loss of Sanity, which came out in the Bengali avant-garde little magazine, Kaurab. His poems and translations have appeared in Indian Literature (print journal of the Indian Academy of Letters, Sahitya Akademi), the World Literature Today blog, Almost Island, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and Live Wire, among other places.

He lives in Calcutta and London.

Co-Editor – Vivek Narayanan (2006–2019)

Associate Editor – Rahul Soni (2013–2019)

Editorial Assistant – Ashwini Bhat (2007–2012)

Web Designer – Itu Chaudhuri (2007–2021)

Web Developer – Gurunandan Bhat (2007–2021)

Web Designer – Siddhartha Chatterjee (2021–)

Almost Island would like to thank Kabir Mohanty for all his help in ideas and practicalities since its inception.

Grants

Almost Island is partly supported by a generous grant from Torsteel Research Foundation in India.