Winner of the Shakti Bhatt Prize 2024, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, born in Sohra, Meghalaya, writes poetry, drama and fiction in Khasi and English. His latest works include The Distaste of the Earth (longlisted for the JCB Prize 2024), the critically acclaimed epic-length novel Funeral Nights (published in the UK and the US in 2024), The Yearning of Seeds: Poems, Time’s Barter: Haiku and Senryu and Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends. He is the co-editor of Late-Blooming Cherries: Haiku Poetry from India (India’s first English-language haiku poetry anthology) and Dancing Earth: An Anthology of Poetry from North-East India.
He has published poems and stories in Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Wasafiri, New Welsh Review, PEN International, Literary Review, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India, The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, The Indian Quarterly, Down to Earth, The Hindu Business Line, Pilgrim’s India, Day’s End Stories and more. His other awards include the Northeast Poetry Award (2004), the Veer Shankar Shah–Raghunath Shah National Award (2008), a Tagore Fellowship (2018), the Bangalore Review June Jazz Award (2021), the Sparrow Literary Award (2022) and Meghalaya’s Tribal Achievers’ Award (2024). He teaches literature at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong.