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.
The Gods Came Afterwards, a book of poems, is a recent work, followed by Extinctions, a book of prose poems that appeared in August, 2022. A new edition of Book One, her very first work, has been released in Dec. 2023.
Mohanty has also translated a selection of Tagore’s fiction, Broken Nest and Other Stories. This is being reissued in Feb. 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.
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.
Her work has been published in journals across the world including Poetry, Granta, World Literature Today, Indian Literature, The New Statesman, the Chinese Jintian, the Cuban Rialta, the Dutch magazine Terras, among others.
Some links to Mohanty’s published work: Granta; Granta; The Caravan; World Literature Today; Poetry Foundation.
She has “performed” her work with the great musician Bahauddin Dagar who is a master of the rudra veena.
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 – Mantra Mukim
Mantra Mukim is a poet and essayist from Raipur, India, and is currently based in Paris. His work has most recently appeared in Minor Literatures, MAP, Datableed, Spamzine, and Rialto. His debut poetry collection, Reserve (the87 press), will come out in 2025.
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.
Editorial Assistant – Veda Aggarwal (2022-)
Veda has a background in features journalism, boutique publishing, graphic design, arts management and yoga. She lives in Pondicherry with her dog.
Associate Editor – Souradeep Roy (2019-2023)
Associate Editor – S. Bharat (2020-2022)
Associate Editor – Rahul Soni (2013–2019)
Co-Editor – Vivek Narayanan (2006–2019)
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.