Nidhi’s first collection, Auguries of a Minor God, was published by Faber & Faber in 2021. A finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and the Butler Literary Award, it was chosen as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, National Poetry Day Recommendation, Shakespeare & Co. Year of Reading Selection, and a Book of the Year by both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent.
Born in India, Nidhi grew up across the Middle East, Europe and North America, before settling in Ireland. She is the recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award in Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and currently serves on the Expert Advisory Committee for Culture Ireland as well as the Advisory Board of Diversifying Irish Poetry.
A Global Peace Ambassador with the Institute for Economics & Peace, she has formerly been honoured as a Davis United World College Scholar, Davis Nuclear Nonproliferation Studies Fellow, and Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Peace & Conflict Fellow.
I am deeply grateful to Dr Peter Rooney and the leadership at Trinity Long Room Hub for this extraordinary opportunity to work with a vibrant research community in an institute at the forefront of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural research.Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe
During her tenure as the Rooney Writer Fellow, Nidhi will research a project titled ‘Honey and the Hare’, exploring the human relationship to the more-than-human across both ancient Celtic and Indian traditions, and ultimately how indigenous wisdom and practices recognising the interconnectedness of being can provide enduring responses to intersecting ecological crises. This transdisciplinary project draws inspiration from Joseph Beuys’s 1965 performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hareand an anonymous Middle English poem ‘The Names of the Hare’, investigating the symbolism of the Hare linking to Vedic, Buddhist, Celtic and Gaelic deities, alchemy, the moon and the feminine while also exploring connections in folklore, mythology and deep ecology.
The Rooney Writer Fellowship was launched in 2021 by Dr Peter Rooney, Director of the Rooney Prize Foundation. The Fellowship enables a creative writer to join the research community in the Trinity Long Room Hub and to engage with the institute’s many research projects and initiatives. The inaugural Fellow in 2022 was author Caitríona Lally.
Professor Eve Patten, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, welcomed Nidhi as the new Rooney Writer Fellow and said that her fascinating research project would “illuminate unchartered aspects of the human relationship with other entities and species, while also furthering research links between Irish and Indian literary traditions.”
Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe said, “I am deeply grateful to Dr Peter Rooney and the leadership at Trinity Long Room Hub for this extraordinary opportunity to work with a vibrant research community in an institute at the forefront of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural research. It’s a rare gift to be able to contribute to this uniquely transformative endeavour of shared discovery. The chance to invite the voices of older, embodied wisdom traditions into conversation with advances in contemporary intellectual discourse and scholarship lives like a bright thing inside me.”
See here for more information on Nidhi’s fellowship.