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 and each compositional framework is created anew.
The Gods Came Afterwards, a book of poems, is a recent work, followed by Extinctions, a book of prose poems. A new edition of Book One, her very first work, was released in December 2023. Mohanty has also translated a selection of Tagore’s fiction, Broken Nest and Other Stories in 2009, which has been reissued and released in April 2025.
Five Movements in Praise has been translated into Spanish and published in Chile and Argentina in 2024. Mohanty was invited to deliver the Roberto Bolano lecture in Santiago, Chile in April 2024, to mark the release of this translation. The book was formally released at this lecture by the profound Chilean poet Raul Zurita.
Five Movements in Praise was also nominated for the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2018.
A chapbook made from a selection of poems from The Gods Came Afterwards appeared early 2020 from Ediciones Pen Presse, New York, in Spanish. The poems are translated by the acclaimed Argentinian poet, Mercedes Roffe.
A selection of these poems was also translated into Arabic for the journal Al Araby Al Jadeed under the initiative of the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish.
Her work has been published in journals across the world including Poetry, Granta, World Literature Today, The Caravan, Indian Literature, The New Statesman, the Chinese Jintian, the Cuban Rialta, and the Dutch magazine Terras, among others.
Some links to Mohanty’s published work: Granta; Granta; The Caravan; World Literature Today; Poetry Foundation.
Mohanty is the Founder Editor of the online literature journal Almost Island, which has been in existence since 2007. She is also the initiator of the related Almost Island Dialogues which is a conversation between eminent writers from India and abroad.
She was on the International Faculty for the Creative Writing MFA at the City University of Hong Kong, from 2010-16. She has also taught at the Creative Writing programme at Naropa University, set up by Allen Ginsberg.
Mohanty has held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany, at Ledig House in New York, had residencies at the La Napoule Foundation for the Arts in France, and Yaddo, USA, 2009. Mohanty is a recipient of a Senior Fellowship from the Indian Ministry of Culture.
An invitation was extended to Mohanty by curator Sudarshan Shetty for 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. At the suggestions of Shetty she also curated the writers at the Biennale and was the one to bring in Raul Zurita, Sergio Chefec, and Valerie Mejer, among others to create installations.
She also participated at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, 2022, with a video and sound installation based on an excerpt from her book Extinction.
She has “performed” her work with the great musician Ustad Bahauddin Dagar who is a master of the rudra veena. The performances have been at Sakshi Art Gallery, Mumbai and G5A Mumbai.
Mohanty has had a deep involvement with the serious Indian cinema. She has worked and interacted with some of its finest practitioners — directors, cinematographers, editors, and sounds designers. Mohanty wrote the script for Nazar, working with the great director Mani Kaul, with whom she had an on-going dialogue for over twenty years till his death in 2011.
She has also been nurtured in her work by an immersion in the artistic traditions of India’s past, which includes having been a student of Dhrupad — the oldest form of Indian classical music — under Ustad Bahauddin Dagar.
Mohanty lives in Bombay with her husband Kabir Mohanty, a filmmaker and video artist.