Karthika Naïr
Karthika Naïr (born 1972) is a French-Indian poet and dance producer and curator. Her notable works include Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, published by HarperCollins India and Arc Publications in 2015. She is India's only poet to have won a literary award for fiction for a work of poetry. Early life and education Karthika Naïr was born in 1972 in Kottayam, Kerala. [1] Her father was an officer in the Indian Army, so she moved around much during her childhood. She spoke in English with her father and in Malayalam with her mother, the sing-song form of which influenced her poetry. She was born with the rare and chronic genetic condition epidermolysis bullosa and was often sick and hospitalised for surgeries growing up. She stayed at home much because of her illness and engaged in reading books that her parents often bought. When she was around 16 years old, she had a feeding tube inserted into her and was subsequently unable to attend college. Instead, she began to pursue a sociology degree through the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). Her parents worried that she would become depressed doing a long course, so they enrolled her at a