Karthika Naïr is the co-author of A Different Distance (Milkweed Editions, 2021), renga written with poet Marilyn Hacker. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reworking of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live Award for Book of the Year (India), and was highly commended at the 2016 Forward Prizes (UK) . Les Oiseaux électriques de Pothakudi (Éditions Hélium/Actes-Sud, 2022), her latest children’s book illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet, is on the shortlist of the 2023 Prix Félipé and the 2023 Prix Franco-Allemand de la littérature de jeunesse.

 

Karthika Naïr’s play Beneath the Music, created and directed by Jay Emmanuel for Encounter Theatre, premieres at the Subiaco Arts Centre in Perth in May 2023. The performances she has scripted and co-scripted have been staged at venues across the world. These include Akram Khan’s multiple-award-winning DESH, and Until the Lions (adapted from a chapter of her eponymous book), an opera produced by Opéra national du Rhin (also adapted from the same book), and Carlos Pons Guerra’s Mariposa, a queer reimagining of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly. She is the co-founder of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Antwerp-based dance company, Eastman, and executive producer of several of his and Damien Jalet’s works.