Photo: Claire McNamee
Niroshini Somasundaram is a writer based in London. Her writing centres stories of girlhood, wounded landscapes and the histories of Tamil women, exploring expressions of interiority, freedom and desire.
She is a current Jerwood Arvon Writer in Residence. Her poetry pamphlet Darling Girl (Bad Betty Press) was released in 2021 and was named one of The Poetry School's Books of the Year. She received a London Writers Award in the literary fiction category and won third place in the Poetry London Prize 2020 for her epistolary sequence 'Letters to Sunny Leone', judged by Ilya Kaminsky. Three of her poems were included in the Bloodaxe anthology Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas (2023), and her work has been highlighted in the Harvard Review and Words Without Borders.
She also writes fiction and non-fiction, and is a Ledbury Poetry Critic. She has been commissioned by Spread the Word and Versopolis, and her work appears in Bedtime Stories for the End of the World. She thinks about poetry alongside a practice in photography and visual culture, and has performed at the Winchester and Aldeburgh Poetry Festivals.
She has spoken about the Jerwood Arvon residency on BBC Radio London's Poetry Corner with Jumoke Fashola, and has taught creative writing, visual culture and text and image work to refugees and asylum seekers at Tara Theatre, working with writers on their own histories.
Born in Sri Lanka, she was raised in Australia and studied law, history and languages at university.