Priya Sarukkai Chabria is an Indian writer and scholar of fourteen books that span poetry, speculative fiction, literary non-fiction, translation and, as editor, three poetry anthologies culled from the decade-long online journal she curated. She doesn’t follow marketplace demands; Priya follows and works on the writing.
PC: Rafiq Elliase
New Release
EARTHRISE Stories Pasts Presents Potentials
“Bridging The Chasms Between Past And Future
Earthrise Stories’ is a masterful narrative in which past wisdom illuminates future survival.
— Vinita Agarwal, OUTLOOK, 1 September, 2025
"… is by turns a solemn, earnest, and playful eclectic collection of poetry and prose that explores climate change concerns from a post-humanist perspective. …. Chabria incorporates interviews, folk tales, myths, urban legends, and science fiction in genre-defying ways to stress the multilayered consequences of climate change across all forms of life… Earthrise Stories is at once Indian, Asian, of the Global South, and indeed global. Chabria’s genre-bending experiment becomes a meta-text on how literature itself must evolve if it is to meet the scale of planetary crisis. Her call to “listen with all your senses” is not merely poetic; it is a radical invitation to reimagine our place in the world.”
— Priteegandha Naik, PR & TA
If writing is protest, then writing hope is a powerful, reverberating protest amidst the din of doomsday prophesying that we have come to expect. It also is protest to not give in to known structures, to hold out hope and courage in the face of a situation that is not behind us but within which we find ourselves in an ever evolving present. It is easy to be dystopic; to be utopic, calls for courage and perseverance, and so, the poetic tone in Earthrise turns inwards, deeply meditative, to access sources of hope as well as excavate what lies beneath, what holds the secrets to resilience and resurgence, to restoration and revival.
A constant play of styles, tones, moods, approaches, and structure underlines a deep concern and engagement with climate, with the universe, with the need to engage and create spaces for conversation that asks of us that we think, do something for ‘earthrise’, for giving in is not an option.
Earthrise is one such collection. It compels readers to stretch their imagination across billions of years; to encompass the past, the present, the future in all their prophecies and potentials.
Let its uniqueness impel you to read, then sit back, let the music of its language, the richness of its images, its vision and world-building flood your senses. For this collection presents the writer at her collective and individual best: as poet, writer, translator and the recreator of myths for a newer world, one in which earth rises once again. The canvas, the scope, the width of vision and imagination, of compassion and belonging, is vast, all-encompassing, all-embodied. This is a book of stories at a heightened level of invoking, querying, demanding answers, seeking pathways towards a single goal.
Calling Over Water
” We need this book of blessings more than we know: “So borrow the river’s tongue rife with rubbish/ and holiness. Get going.”
---John Bradley
Author of Erotica Atomica
“…combines organic echoes and inner stammer, overlapping voices of multifariousness in a poetic exercise of intertextuality rare to be found in Anglophone Indian poetry… (poetry empowered by rich experiences and widening travels, a knowledge-based alacrity imbued by deep cultural curiosity also engages in a wonderfully elusive nature writing that maps out her travelogues, resisting disruption and myth-building at the same time.)
— Aryanil Mukerjee
Poet and translator, editor, Kaurab
Andal - The Autobiography of a Goddess
— with Ravi Shankar
‘Chabria has re-created Andal... She uses the play of image, experience and thought… to excavate Andal. She enters her source through the membrane of Andal’s imagination, only to subsume herself within it… Chabria peels every context and imagery to touch upon the inner essence.( Her nuanced interpretations give Andal a present aesthetic reality. …Chabria ’s version… shimmers in the tension between the inner and the outer; the inner — Narayana — and the outer..’)
— T. M. Krishan
Carnatic Muscian, Author, Winner Ramon Magsaysay Award
Sing of Life - Revisioning Tagore's Gitanjali
Contemplative and courageous, this is a reimagining of Tagore and his work for a new generation of readers.
'The Daring Act of Rewriting Tagore. 'Sing of Life' reinterprets a classic through an innovative poetic apparatus… Chabria …rejects the Achalayatan of petrified veneration and sets sail in the Sonar Tori (Golden Boat) of poetry.'
— The Daring Act of Rewriting Tagore,
Uttaran Das Gupta, The Wire.in
'How Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Gitanjali’ got a new rendition in the hands of a modern poet'
'The poems of Priya Sarukkai Chabria are passionate, sensuous and intelligent, full of energy and enterprise. They hold their dramatic shapes with grace and establish her as a poet to read and return to time and again.'
— George Szirtes
Poet, translator, memoirist, T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize winner, Man Booker International winner as translator
‘Her work is absolutely extraordinary. She has an amazing ability to handle historical and mythic material in ways that make them completely new.’
— Dennis Nurkse
Poet, Literature Awardee from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Fellowship.
'I believe a great poem is one that often serves as a draft or raft for someone else’s poem. Or that is how it should be: A spark or a shift in another’s consciousness.’
— Priya, on Sing of Life
In this inspired linguistic experiment, Priya seeks to capture that spark and give it new life by chiselling Tagore’s prose-poetry into intense poems that invite us to re-engage with the Gitanjali.
Clone
“A witty, poetic dream, in a voice clear as a winter morning, sharp as a sliver of obsidian. This wondrous book gives me a strange, fearful joy."
--- Eileen Gunn
Author of Questionable Practices.
“a fresh, genre-bending variety of Indian speculative fiction …– The writing… is instilled with an ephemeral, almost transcendental quality. (The book …is a cerebral exercise in unravelling, collecting the myriad pieces of apparently disparate elements, and fitting the puzzle pieces together ) to ultimately hold up a magnificent tapestry as ephemeral, mystical and philosophical as the prose and style employed by the author."
The Dragon’s Heart World Poetry in Translation
Editors
Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Mrinalini Harchandrai
“This multilayered anthology from Poetry at Sangam is a polyglot polyphony, a circle of poetic joy and creative plurality.”
– Georges Szirtes
“Some of the finest living poets and translators.”
– Namita Gokhale
The Dragon’s Heart: World Poetry in Translation, is an anthology of Indian and international poetry in translation, co-edited by Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Mrinalini Harchandrai, and published by Jadavpur University Press in January 2025.
The anthology is culled from the pages of Poetry at Sangam, a distinguished online literary journal dedicated to poetry and poetry in translation. It was founded by Priya Sarukkai Chabria in 2013 and ran till 2023. It was co-edited by Poetry at Sangam’s Founding Editor Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Deputy Editor Mrinalini Harchandrai who joined in 2021. Over the course of a decade, Poetry at Sangam, became a nexus for voices both Indian and international.
The Dragon’s Heart: World Poetry in Translation is published by Jadavpur University Press, 2025. It is a celebration of 10 years of Poetry at Sangam and features poetry translated into English from 33 languages from India and abroad. It features over 80 translators, 11 guest editors and almost 150 poets and translators across its 500+ pages.
The anthology honours plurality, not only in featuring 33 languages across India and the world, but also in the very methods by which the written word is reimagined and rendered into English. Translation, in this collection, is not a mere conduit, but an art in itself, held in equal regard with the original poems it seeks to bring into a new light. It is a celebration of translation—a delicate negotiation between fidelity and freedom, form and meaning, the literal and the ineffable.