Bhanu Kapil


Bhanu Kapil is a British-Indian writer who currently resides in Colorado. She teaches at Naropa University and as part of Goddard College's low-residency MFA program. She is the author of a number of books, including The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Incubation: A Space for Monsters, and Ban en Banlieue.

Career

Kapil's first book, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, was written in the late 1990s and was submitted to Kelsey Street Press by a friend of hers. Khapil has noted that "Left to my own devices, the whole manuscript would be... trash. A kind of note-taking never made public." From an early age, she had an interest in becoming a writer, and cited Salman Rushdie's 1980 Booker Prize win as a formative experience for her: "...perhaps then, for the first time, I understood that someone like me: could. Could look like me and write.". In early 2015, The Believer held a round-table discussion of Bhanu Kapil's work over the course of three days, featuring writers like Kate Zambreno and Sofia Samatar.
Kapil's work can be difficult to classify, occupying a space between poetry and fiction. 2009's Humanimal: A Project for Future Children took its inspiration from the nonfiction account of Amala and Kamala, two girls found "living with wolves in colonial Bengal." Douglas A. Martin has described Incubation: A Space For Monsters as "a feminist, post-colonial On the Road." Kapil also contributed the introduction to Amina Cain's short story collection I Go To Some Hollow. Kapil's creative work also encompasses performance art and her public readings sometimes blur the line between the traditional poetry reading and performance. Her poetry appeared in a collection edited by Brian Droitcour that was produced as part of the New Museum's 2015 Triennial.
Incubation: A Space for Monsters was a Small Press Distribution best-seller. Ban en Banlieue was named as one of Time Out New York's most anticipated books of early 2015
In March 2020 Kapil was awarded one of the eight Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes.

Works

  • The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Kelsey Street Press, 2001,
  • Incubation: A Space for Monsters, Leon Works, 2006,
  • Humanimal: A Project for Future Children, Kelsey Street Press, 2009,
  • Schizophrene, Nightboat Books, 2011,
  • Ban en Banlieue, Nightboat Books, 2015,
  • How to Wash a Heart, Liverpool University Press, 2020,