 |
| Pooja Nansi |
- She’s Singapore’s first Youth Poet Ambassador and the director of the Singapore Writers Festival since 2019. Pooja Nansi also published the poetry collection We Make Spaces Divine last year, and founded the performance and page poetry platform Speakeasy.
- “Especially for women, I think the narrative of ageing is such a patriarchal one. The idea that the older a woman gets, the less desirable she becomes, because youth is the goal to strive for: anti-ageing and anti-wrinkle creams in the beauty industry, the narrative that there’s an urgency to achieve things in your youth – like getting married or having children – these are the narratives I think all women have come up against at some point. I don’t really know what age means, to be honest. But I do think ageing for me so far has meant living, and therefore wisdom. I do know that the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve seen and the more I understand – or I hope so anyway.
I remember being in my 20s and having this deep anxiety of turning 30. Now, anytime I hear younger women expressing those feelings, I always tell them: Your 30s are going to be incredible and so much better than your 20s. They were for me, and I was so much more sure of who I was. Of course, there was some anxiety about turning 40, but oddly enough, there was some excitement too: I was personally going through so much, I had just had a baby at 38, and my body had changed in ways I had never even imagined – it was like I was trying to relearn myself.
Pooja Nansi Biography
- Pooja Nansi is a poet and educator who believes in the power that performance can lend to the written word. She has published two collections of poetry; Stiletto Scars (2007) and Love is An Empty Barstool (2013). She also co-edited SingPoWriMo: The Anthology (2014), and co-authored Local Anaesthetic: a Painless Approach to Singaporean Poetry (2014), a teacher’s resource for Singaporean poetry. She has also participated in poetry projects such as Speechless with the British Council in 2009, where she engaged in a month long tour of the UK to explore issues surrounding freedom of speech.
From April 2013 to February 2018, she curated a monthly spoken word and poetry event called Speakeasy at Artistry, which has showcased both emerging and established poets from places as diverse as Burma and Botswana. She also runs the Singapore chapter of Burn After Reading, a collective started for young emerging poets (aged 16-24) who are encouraged to write, read, perform and publish as widely as possible (the original London chapter has been run by poet Jacob Sam-La Rose since 2011).
In December 2018, she and Shridar Mani organised and produced the minority voices festival Other Tongues as a Youth Poet Ambassador Public Programme. She has also been appointed as the Festival Director of the Singapore Writers Festival from 2019 onwards.
Since 2009, she has also been one half of the spoken word and music duo The Mango Dollies along with singer-songwriter Anjana Srinivasan. As an educator and writer, she believes strongly in making poetry relevant to the lives of the young people she comes in contact with. In 2016, she received the Young Artist Award.
