Nikita Parik (2022-23)
Nikita Parik is the 2022-2023 Charles Wallace Fellow at the University of Stirling, Scotland. Most recently, her third book, My City is a Murder of Crows (2022), has been nominated for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar and shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize. Her permanent poetry installation, as part of the University’s House of Words initiative, stands on a glass pane in Crush Hall, Pathfoot Building, UoS. She has recently presented talks, readings, and workshops at SOAS University of London, University of Kent, University of Stirling, and University of Calcutta.
Her books have been reviewed/featured in The Wire, Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), The Statesman, Business Standard, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (Sage Journals), Outlook India, The Book Review India, and Kavya Bharati, among others. You can find some of her poems in Rattle, Scroll, Scrawl Place, the University of Stirling blog, Stanford University’s Poetry Gallery, and the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English. She can be contacted through email.
Stirling: Of heart and hearth
The loch at the heart of the University of Stirling campus sort of anchored me even when I was not physically around it. I didn’t even realise when it became the centre of my little universe here – every movement away from it was a soft centrifugal force towards the circumference of the rest of the UK Skyline. I spent hours with the loch, a little diary and pen by my side, observing its ecosystem, being lost in the formations of the midges on particularly warm days. This eventually gave birth to a whole series of loch poems.
My time in Stirling was filled with constant, consistent inspiration, which led me to ideate and write more than I ever have in one stretch or season. The fellowship months for me translated into plenty of writing peppered with readings, panel discussions, workshops, and collaborative literary experiences across the United Kingdom. When I wasn’t writing, I took to translating the works of my colleagues, or discovering newer Scottish and Irish poets at the wonderfully well-stocked libraries on campus and around the city. In a full circle moment, by the end of my fellowship, it was wonderful to see my books in three libraries across England and Scotland.
I wanted to experience the literary landscape of UK through its people, and the inimitable Dr Gemma Robinson, head of the Charles Wallace Fellowship at the University of Stirling, helped me achieve exactly that. Soon enough, I found myself a part of an ecosystem of academics, students, writers, artists, and just local residents across Stirling (and also the other cities I visited). Apart from formal university readings, I was part of readings at local cafes, bookstores, historical museums, and libraries, which led to some wonderful experiences and created friendships that I will deeply cherish forever.
My travels took me to places from Dover to the Scottish Highlands, from the UNESCO City of Literature, Edinburgh, to little English hamlets. Some of the translations I attempted often coincided with how I was feeling.
As my fellowship period came to a close, it was quite a high to watch a poem of mine being printed from the Pathfoot Press by the amazing Dr Jackson.
Watch a video of the printing process.
Printing Press
Wood and metal. Ink and kerosene. Sunlight filtering in from a glass window. And an iridescent, rising stream of dust- loud, LOUD, and ancient. Now an arranging of the elements: wood and metal, paper and ink, until, the loud clack! clack! clack! of a printing machine is heard, erupting, purring, coming to life. An ecosystem seems to be coming together to aid this creation. One holds a piece of beige paper against pools of sunlight: letters- red, black, in bold, in italics. Letters swimming in this off-white universe between perfectly symmetrical lengths and widths. One sighs, then whispers to the nuts and bolts.
And finally, one of the most rewarding moments of the entire fellowship for me was when my poem went up on one of the glass panes of Crush Hall, Pathfoot Building, for the House of Words installation, and I realised how utterly inseparable I feel from this campus and this city now, like a freshly formed umbilical cord tying me to it for eternity.