Jayant Kashyap

Jayant Kashyap is an Indian poet and academic. In 2021, his poem 'Earth, Fire', written after Yvonne Reddick's 'Translating Mountains from the Gaelic', won the Young Poets competition at the Wells Festival of Literature, judged by the poet Phoebe Stuckes. Kashyap's first pamphlet, Survival, was published by Clare Songbirds Publishing House in 2019, and his second, Unaccomplished Cities, was published by Ghost City Press in 2020. In 2021, Skear Zines published a limited-edition zine, Water. His third pamphlet, Notes on Burials, won the Poetry Business New Poets Prize in 2024, judged by the poet Holly Hopkins.

Education

Kashyap graduated from Sam Higginbottom University of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences, Prayagraj (India), with a bachelor's degree in Microbiology in 2023. He is currently pursuing an MTech degree in Biomedical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Indore.

Career

Kashyap was first noticed in 2018 through the publication of his poem 'From Bletchley With Love', which was the third-prize winner in the Bletchley Park poetry challenge, judged by the writer So Mayer, on The Poetry Society's Young Poets Network. Since then, he has published work in popular journals such as Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Poetry London, New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Most of his recent poems have focussed on ecocriticism and environmental awareness, with birds being an essential element in them. Yashasvi Vachhani, writing about a set of poems published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, observes that "the reader does not even realise when they step out of their own skin to merge with the bird on the page." The Bombay Literary Magazine also published Kashyap's poem about his namesake Jayanta, son of Indra, which Aswin Vijayan, associate poetry editor, noted as an introduction of his "crow into the tradition of crows in anglophone Indian poetry", alongside the work of such poets as Arun Kolatkar.

Several of Kashyap's poems have received considerable acclaim, with nominations for a Pushcart Prize and for Sundress Publications Best of the Net twice. In 2021, a poem titled 'A Positively Violent Poem in Five Parts', which was the second prize winner in the Poems to Solve the Climate Crisis Challenge on Young Poets Network, was exhibited at COP26, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. The UK Department for Education-commissioned 'Education Nature Park' project's KS4 Poetry and nature resource features this poem. 'Nilgai' received an honourable mention in the 2023 Dan Veach Prize for Younger Poets at the Atlanta Review.

More poems are archived at Visual Verse and the Poetry Society.

His first and second pamphlets, Survival and Unaccomplished Cities, were respectively published by Clare Songbirds Publishing House in 2019 and Ghost City Press in 2020. Published as part of the 2020 Summer Series, Unaccomplished Cities was selected by Ava Wolf and Dior J. Stephens, and the cover design was done by Sania Salman Dar. Vic Pickup, in her review, notes that this "ten-poem sequence revisits key points of trauma in human history — from man’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, to the ashes of Pompeii, bombed-out Düsseldorf and the bloody past of the poet’s native India."

Kashyap's forthcoming third pamphlet, Notes on Burials, won the Poetry Business New Poets New Poets Prize in 2024. The contest was judged by the poet Holly Hopkins, who said about the poems as being "cool, reflective". He also published a limited-edition zine, Water, with Skear Zines in 2019.

He has served on the mastheads of Quarterly West, The Adroit Journal, and Surging Tide Magazine as poetry reader and editor. In 2018, Kashyap co-founded a literary magazine, Bold + Italic (currently on hiatus), which also included writer Kat Devitt and poet Lisa Stice as editors. They've published a total of five issues so far.

He is currently working on "longer collections about people, places and being in love", and on a manuscript about the colour 'blue'.

Works

Poetry

• Survival (Clare Songbirds, 2019)
• Unaccomplished Cities (Ghost City Press, 2020)
• Water (Skear Zines, 2021)

Awards

• 2021: Winner (First Prize), Young Poets competition, Wells Festival of Literature
• 2024: Winner, The Poetry Business New Poets Prize