Tishani Doshi's Egrets, While War: poem features & interviews
'Egrets, While War draws on everything from myth and family history to the metaverse, to create a word-weather, a landscape of individual imagery which we apprehend on our skin. An original and sensory exploration of beauty and loss in the environment and in the body.' – Imtiaz Dharker
Tishani Doshi's fifth collection Egrets, While War is published by Bloodaxe Books in May 2026. This new collection is a lyric field guide to grief and resilience, where attention becomes a form of devotion, and intimacy, a quiet resistance.
The poems in Egrets, While War navigate the deep entanglements between environmental loss, ancestral memory, the slow transformations of ageing, and the devastations of war. Birds appear throughout these pages, not simply as subjects but as symbols and messengers, witnesses to war, extinction and exile. Mythic birds from the Ramayana fly alongside city pigeons and wild peacocks, forming a living archive of flight and disappearance. Here, love and desire emerge not as consolation, but as a form of radical presence – one of the last ways we remain tethered to the world. With lyric clarity and a gaze both wide and precise, Egrets, While War becomes a meditation on survival – of species, of history, of the heart.
Tishani Doshii is an award-winning poet, novelist and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent, born in Madras, India, in 1975. She received her master's in writing from the Johns Hopkins University in America and worked in London in advertising before returning to India in 2001 to work with the choreographer Chandralekha, going on to perform with her on many international stages.
Her debut collection, Countries of the Body (Aark Arts, 2006), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second poetry collection, Everything Begins Elsewhere, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2012. Her third, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2018. Her fourth poetry collection, A God at the Door (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her fifth, Egrets, While War, is published by Bloodaxe in May 2026.
Tishani Doshi lives on a beach between two fishing villages in Tamil Nadu with her husband and dogs. She is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
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'In Egrets, While War, grief and beauty share the same open palm – egrets lifting through smoke, mythic birds guiding ancestry through the present – and her incandescent poems insist that attention itself is a form of love. Even as war and extinction press close, Doshi keeps turning us toward astonishment, toward the tender fact of being alive together in a world that is breaking and still unbearably radiant.' – Aimee Nezhukumatathil
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Tishani Doshi will be on tour in the UK and Ireland from 23 May to 28 June 2026 to launch her fifth collection Egrets, While War. Details on our events page here.
At some of the events she will be performing a dance piece which she has created especially for this book. A short trailer can be seen on YouTube here.
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ONLINE POEM FEATURE IN WASAFIRI MAGAZINE
Wasafiri Magazine, Exclusive online poem feature, 11 May 2026
Three new poems by Tishani Doshi have been featured exclusively online on Wasafiri Magazine's website ahead of publication of the Bloodaxe edition of Egrets, While War on 21 May 2026.
‘Sonnet for the Two Birds that Kick off the Ramayana’ and ‘Sonnet for the Chātak: Steadfast Bird of Indic Love Poetry that Subsists Only on Raindrops’ appear in the Bloodaxe edition of Egrets, While War. A late addition to the book, ‘Monsieur Tout-Le-Monde', will be published in the upcoming Indian and American editions of the collection.
https://www.wasafiri.org/content/three-poems-by-tishani-doshi/
ONLINE CONVERSATION WITH TISHANI DOSHI
Poetry London, Online Exclusive Conversation, online 8 May 2026
An in-depth online exclusive conversation between Tishani Doshi and Michael Symmons Roberts went online on Poetry London’s website on 8 May 2026. The two poets discussed one another's work and shared themes in their new collections Egrets, While War and Dog Star.
https://poetrylondon.co.uk/birdsong-in-the-shadows/
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JOINT ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT
Tuesday 19 May, 7pm BST, online launch event
Joint online launch event for new May titles by Tishani Doshi, Patricia Smith and Jennifer Lee Tsai. All three poets will be celebrating the publication of their new books by reading live and discussing their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley.
This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live on this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/4x0gzWrAClU
Watch live or later via YouTube.
[13 May 2026]
