These poems by Ifaam Bashir and Zainab Ummer Farook won the inaugural Osmosis Poetry Prize

The Osmosis Poetry Prize is a newly instituted award founded by poets Yashasvi Vachhani, Kunjana Parashar and Kinjal Sethia. The aim of the prize is to celebrate contemporary Indian poets writing in English. It is awarded to two poets, each winning a cash reward of Rs 10,000 and a citation from an external judge. This year the prize has been won by poets Ifaam Bashir and Zainab Ummer Farook. Sohini Basak was the judge for the inaugural iteration of the prize.

Basak said about Bashir, “In [his] packet of poems, loss and yearning are stitched delicately along the margins of the landscapes and the architecture the poet inhabits. The ghosts who tread these atmospheric poems offer soft and warm solace. Crucially, the deft control of an even-toned yet dreamy register of images and emotions left ample gaps for me, the reader, to dwell in ‘the grammar of absence’: the nooks and crannies of the houses in disrepair, the frayed end of things, fading memories, the whispering moonlight, and allowed me a gentleness to grieve with/in.”

“It is not easy to write a poem about My Neighbour Totoro without going into clichés about trees or cats, but Zainab Ummer Farook’s first poem homing a...

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