KNOW KARAN
“I like simplicity. I lack simplicity.”
Karan Kapoor prefers pencils over pens. They spent the first four years of their writing life swirling pencils in their fingers while working on a novel with a friend. The Dreaming Reality was published in 2018, and has since spread and received a lot of love.
After that, they spent a year and a half working on a novelette, Maya, exploring the complexities of dysfunctional relationships.
That is when they became a practitioner of poetry. They try to observe life and extract sense out of its meaninglessness. Their time is consumed by putting those observations on paper. Their poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in AGNI, North American Review, Rattle, Colorado Review, Poetry Online, The Offing, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. They have been awarded or placed for the James Hearst Poetry Prize, Frontier Global Poetry Prize, Ledbury Poetry Prize, Julia Darling Memorial Prize, Red Wheelbarrow Prize, John & Eileen Allman Prize, Orison Anthology Award, and Literary Taxidermy Competition.
They are currently working on three full-length poetry collections. The first one is Dida: almost 100 poems (free verse, prose, listicles, ghazals, sestinas, villanelles, etc) about his grandmother’s prolonged illness and death. The second one is titled Portrait of the Alcoholic as a Father: over 50 poems (often using hybrid forms like the interview, questionnaire, visual fragments and traditional forms like ghazal, villanelle, and free verse) profiling his father. The poems are an attempt at an obsessive portrait of another that ends up also as a self-portrait. A portion of this collection was shortlisted for the Rattle Chapbook Prize, and the full collection was a semi-finalist for the Charles B. Wheeler Prize. The third one is titled What it is is what it is not and what it is not is what it is.
When not writing or zoning out over classical music, they are obsessing over Leonard Cohen. It is a cause for concern that they spend far more time reading than they do writing; it's appallingly disproportionate.
For the purpose of this bio, they are thinking of other hobbies, etc., but if they are to be honest, they don't know how to do much else.
Since last year, they have lived in Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Chandigarh. Having graduated with MA in Literary Art Creative Writing from Ambedkar University, this year they will be beginning their MFA at Virginia Tech.
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