Tishani Doshi was born in Madras, India, in 1975 to Welsh-Gujarati parents. Showing a proclivity for performance at an early age, she choreographed Abba’s “The Winner Takes it All” for a high school dance competition, which fed into her competitive nature, and possibly led to her pursuing a career in poetry and dance.Tishani’s debut collection of poems, Countries of the Body, won the prestigious Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006. She is also the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, the All-India Poetry Prize for her poem The Day We Went to the Sea, and was finalist in the Outlook-Picador Non-Fiction competition for her essay, Excerpts from the Journals of a Delusional Widow.
Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers, was published to critical acclaim by Bloomsbury in 2010 and translated into several languages. It was short-listed for the Hindu Best Fiction Award, and longlisted for the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary award.
Her latest book is a collection of poems, Everything Begins Elsewhere. It is published by HarperCollins (India), Bloodaxe (UK) and Copper Canyon (USA). Currently Tishani divides her time between a village by the sea in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere.