Poetry

I am a bilingual poet. I use my parents’ first names – Padma-Uday – as my second name for literary writing.

I write poems in English and the language of my birth, Hindi. I have been writing poems since I was 9. I first published my poem in a literary journal in 2010. After a decade of writing for newspapers and leading teams for e-commerce companies, I got back to writing poetry again in 2020. I was featured among 40 Indian poets in The Punch magazine Special Poetry Issue, Jan 2022. I am also featured as one of the 90 writers and illustrators from Ireland in the Breaking Ground Ireland booklet 2022.

I have derived great value from reading poetry of great poets, and some of my favourites are Louise Glück, Elizabeth Bishop, Maya Angelou, Mahadevi Verma, Arundhati Subramanian, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, Amrita Pritam, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, TS Eliot, Michael Ondaatje, Mary Oliver, Erica Jong, Audre Lourde, Nikki Giovanni, and Lola Ridge.

I studied English literature in my undergraduate years, before training as a business historian. I hold MSc in Economic History from London School of Economics and Political Science. Originally from India, I live in the UK.