2022-23

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe is a poet, pacifist and fabulist. Auguries of a Minor God, her first collection, was published by Faber & Faber in 2021. A finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and the Butler Literary Award, it was chosen as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, National Poetry Day Recommendation, Shakespeare & Co. Year of Reading Selection, and a Book of the Year by both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent.

Born in India, Nidhi grew up across the Middle East, Europe and North America, before calling Ireland home. Founder of the Play It Forward Fellowships for underrepresented writers, she is poetry editor at Skein Press and Fallow Media, and contributing editor with The Stinging Fly. She co-edited Hold Open The Door, a special commemorative anthology from The Ireland Chair of Poetry (UCD Press, 2020 | UChicago Press, 2021). She is the recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award in Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and currently serves on the Expert Advisory Committee for Culture Ireland as well as the Advisory Board of Diversifying Irish Poetry.

A Global Peace Ambassador with the Institute for Economics & Peace, she has formerly been honoured as a Davis United World College Scholar, Davis Nuclear Nonproliferation Studies Fellow, and Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Peace & Conflict Fellow. She earned a BA in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic, MA in Eastern Classics from The Graduate Institute at St. John’s College, and MFA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin where she was a recipient of the inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award. She was appointed Chair of the Rekha Eipe Memorial Foundation for Women’s Empowerment and Education at Amrita University in 2021. 

During her tenure as the Rooney Writer Fellow, Nidhi will research a project titled ‘Honey and the Hare’, an epistemological study into the alchemical quest for the numinous. Taking its departure from Joseph Beuys’s 1965 performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, she will investigate the core elements that Beuys used to interrogate and extend his idea of a ‘social sculpture’ in the human relationship to the more-than-human, including the totemic figure of the hare and the elixir of immortality, across both ancient Celtic and Indian traditions.  
www.ariaeipe.com