Anushka Shah

Anushka Shah

Anushka Shah is four-time winner of Nottingham Young Creative Writer of the Year, and  one of four Young Creative Award winners selected to be showcased for UKYA City  Takeover: Nottingham ’19. Her poem ‘Simply pointless.’ was designed, printed, and  circulated around the City of Nottingham for the opening and duration of the festival. Later in  2019, Anushka began her studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at the  University of Oxford. Her originality and flair have won her writing prizes in an academic  context also, namely for her essays related to current affairs. At Oxford, Anushka took on the  role of Editorial Co-Lead for the multi-media journal ‘oxford public philosophy’, alongside a  range of other extracurriculars such as student consultancy work, French classes, and  volunteering. She writes poetry, fiction, and pieces that are neither or in-between.  

Here, she talks some more about her writing and motivations.  

“I am mesmerised by how a rearrangement of the same few letters on a page can evoke almost  tangible images. I once read a book so good that I could taste it; I think back to it now and I  am again in Australia, a country I have never visited. In my poem ‘Growin’ up with Emily’, I  write ‘some people are born / with reading holes for eyes’. I am one of these people. I could  revel in words for years, I think.  

My work is varied: sometimes droll, at other times contemplative, and often evocative. I  particularly enjoy exploring philosophical themes, and several of my poems focus on time.  Petronius’s Trimalchio and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby particularly strike a chord in this respect,  with Trimalchio having ‘a clock and uniformed trumpeter in his dining-room, to keep telling  him how much of his life is lost and gone’. My work seems to take a less sombre version of  this theme, but often has a similar nostalgia. Writing, I feel, allows one to savour a moment a  little more, preserve it, even share it. It seems hardly revolutionary to think we can harness it  to learn from, and with, one another, and empathise at an extraordinary level.  

Even when we are entirely rinsed out and spun upside down, we still have words. I regularly  hang mine up on a clothes line, watch them change colour as they dry. “

UKYA projects:  

UKYA City Takeover: Nottingham ’19 Partnership with Young Creative Awards