RHIYA PAU

Rhiya Pau is a British-born poet, performer and educator based in San Francisco. Her debut collection Routes (Arachne Press, 2022), received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. Commemorating fifty years since her family arrived in the UK, Routes chronicles the migratory history of Pau’s ancestors and navigates the conflicts of identity that arise within the East African-Indian diaspora.

Rhiya won the Creative Future Writers’ Award (2021) and has been highly commended in the Forward Prize (2023), and the After The End Poetry Competition (2024). Her poems appear in Wasafiri, The Liminal Transit Review, Token Magazine, Off The Chest, and Third Space anthologies, among others.

Off the page, you can find Rhiya teaching workshops, hosting events and performing at festivals and open mic nights. She is one half of ORIGINS Poetry Duo, alongside Ankita Saxena, writing and performing collective poetry that does away with notions of “ownership” and “linearity,” to decolonize and decentralize historical narratives. Rhiya was part of fluent’s inaugural PRAXIS residency and has served as a reader for The Adroit Journal.

ROUTES

Winner of a Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award

At the core of this debut collection is a question – what is worth holding onto?

Routes journeys from Ba’s kitchen in Sonia Gardens to Independence hour in Delhi, across the pink shores of Nakuru, to meet a painter on Lee High Road. 

Celebrating fifty years since her community arrived in the UK, Pau chronicles the migratory histories of her ancestors and simultaneously lays bare the conflicts of identity that arise from being a member of the East African-Indian diaspora. In poetic experiments that blend the academic and the artistic, Pau wrestles with language, narrative and memory, daring to navigate their collective fallibilities to construct her own identity.

PRAISE FOR ROUTES

  • “Routes… holds up to the light the wisdom of the past, and asks what else is passed down along with it. This is a collection in which routes and roots tug against one another: a family is scattered in the wake of India’s Partition; its children and grandchildren make new homes for themselves within a kaleidoscope of tongues. This is a work of humane intelligence, formal experiment and linguistic verve that promises much.”

    Sarah Howe

  • “Rhiya Pau’s collection is a feast of language… from India’s Independence struggle to the global pandemic, Pau maps the political and emotional landscapes of her immigrant Gujarati family, bringing their many worlds to life… with richly diverse and experimental storytelling, this collection re-imagines and re-interprets the many possibilities and meanings of identity, diaspora, belonging, and community for South Asian immigrants everywhere.”

    Jenny Bhatt

  • “[Routes] seeks to capture how the violence and legacies of Partition seep into everything…”

    Sana Goyal

ENOUGH

Winner of the Platinum Poetry Prize in 2021 Creative Future Writers’ Award, and was first published in their corresponding anthology ‘Essential’

My grandmother houses Gods in her closet among tower blocks
of cereal boxes and canned chickpeas so we may always know enough.

She stews landscapes with the windows closed, wills the extractor fan
to take her home. Generations drift, climbing ladders that raise you

as an only child. Language limps ashamed in the mouth, we fill silence
with sakar and gleaming jewels of pomegranate. Love is a miner’s purple hands

for we have lost the words for indigo and magenta – lust and rage are faded
characters. At the margins I find her, at the Post Office queuing for stamps,

returning lyrics to the radio, songs of abundance heard on the static,
some place even she has forgotten. Lord, how do I cross this abyss?

We did not brave the seas, sever the limb of belonging for this.
To whom can I confess: I am grateful but this is not enough.

Bring me the raags. Bring me the mirrored, midnight ghoomar.
Bring me qawwali under the heat of the marigold sun.

RESOURCES

CONTACT

Rhiya is available for collaborations, commissions, editorial work, performance and workshop facilitation. Please fill out the form below and she will be in touch!