The Interview : Akhil Katyal

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl, in conversation with Akhil Katyal, winner of The Wise Owl Literary Awards 2026 (Poetry) on the creativity and inspiration behind his poetry collection The Last Time I Saw You.

Congratulations on your beautiful and deeply moving collection, Akhil. Thank you for speaking with The Wise Owl.

RS: Every book begins with what one might call a moment of reckoning. Would you be willing to share the personal experience or inner stirring that first set The Last Time I Saw You in motion?

AK: Rachna, it will be difficult to pin-point a particular moment. I think it happened over many weeks and months after a particularly pinching separation. The book itself took about half a decade from inception to completion. Grief is lived in a longue durée of sorts. I think since I often write poetry in order to inhabit my world fully, to make a day liveable, and this writing on a daily basis, and particularly the writing of the poems of this book, must have been a response to the waves of grief at someone's departure that came and washed over me over a long period of time, and how it changed my relationship to the world around me. The book becomes a testament to the way the pall of grief spreads in our lives, and distorts the way we inhabit time and place. 

RS: The Last Time I saw You carries with it an overhang of grief and also a sense that the grief is being allowed its own time and texture. As you wrote, did poetry become a space to articulate loss, rather than to explain or contain it?

AK: Much of what I said in the previous response is captured in your wonderful question. Grief's texture is slow, sometimes pronounced, sometimes almost imperceptible. It reorders your daily life. It makes you see the people and buildings and trees and cinema and streets and monuments around you in a different light. The poetic challenge is to find a vocabulary for this reordering of the world. For how one's dailiness itself has irreversibly altered. One allows it time. One allows it drafts. One allows it the long arc of revision. One allows a host of characters into one's lifeworlds from outside the romantic dyad. Finally, one allows the grief itself to shift from the deafening clang of its first hit to its slow percolation in the everyday. Poetry becomes the space to acknowledge this transformation, this everyday which is unrecognizable from that ante-bellum world before someone left.

RS: The collection gathers a quiet, unexpected community—saints, musicians, animals, stones, feathers, histories. How do these presences enter your work, and what kind of companionship do they offer in a book shaped by absence?

AK: The vacuum created by an individual's departure is filled in by a bursting collective. Outside the inviduating force of romantic love, is a form of love, informed by grief, that is far more capacious, far more receptive to the stimuli of the world - its people, its places, its histories, and its entities, whether animate or inanimate, whether flora or fauna. I looked for consolation in my city and a host of figures crowded around me. Begum Samru, from 18th century Delhi and Sardhana, gave an account of a turbulent life and persuaded me how each rupture can be lived. Ustab Bismillah Khan promised a vision of the world of togetherness and fraternity that was already fraying in front of my eyes. The butterflies of Sanjay Van or the blue bulls of Jahanpanah, the fog behind Lal Qila or the rains on my Jangpura terrace, all held me, and became vehicles which could carry that which otherwise would have weighed down my shoulders. This 'unexpected community' then is a community only enabled, and perceived, by the almost miraculous lucidity of grief.

RS: The city, especially Delhi, appears as both shelter and wound, holding private sorrow against public crises like the pandemic and communal violence. How much did the chaos and loss of the pandemic and the social fractures of communal violence impact your writing?

AK: No loss is lived alone. No loss belongs only to oneself. Loss which can often make us self-indulgent can also, if attended to, become the window to a shared world, to a fraternality, or sorts. The pandemic, apart from showing the blazing harshness of inequality in our part of the world, also showed us that help can come from many quarters. That people can show up for each other in unexpected and beautiful ways. That oxygen cylinders can be crowd sourced, that fundraisers can be planned, that a hive mind can offer all forms of help. That loss itself can be somehow collectively held. But the rupture of communal violence showed the limits of co-existence in urban life. Where the promise of co-living shattered and the loss was borne preponderantly by the religious minority. But this was a loss at the doorstep of an entire city. The fabric of coexistence frayed and undermined the city for everyone. To some, their entire worlds ended. To others, their world would forever be brutalized. The aggressors would now never know what it could have been to live in a world not wracked by hatred. They might see it as victory but it is a systematic voiding of their world. Loss functions on this wider terrain. I tried to find a vocabulary of loss that could be attentive to this terrain, to the urban, not just the individual, shapes of grief.

RS: There is a notable restraint in the language—emotion is carefully held, never allowed to spill. However, this very restraint accentuates the sense of loss. Is this a matter of craft, instinct, or ethics for you when writing about grief and love?

AK: Limits are often generative. Constraints, on most days, tend to sharpen the creative efflux. Boundaries often tend to put the material that is bound in further relief. Restraint, in that sense, is utterly necessary, especially for poems on subject matters which may tend to get overwhelming very easily, and what is weightier than that hyphenated thing we call love and loss. This restraint may sometimes be that of syllable count, sometimes of rhyme, sometimes of reprising an image in a long free-verse poem, sometimes of an intertextual tribute which must be allowed to transform the associations of your own words. Each of these restraints tend to make the otherwise shapeless (and frankly very possibly annoying) chaos of grief into something that be held in the hands and scrutinized closely, appassioned fully, and allowed to give us all its yield.

RS: What Next?

AK: In the next decade, a book of poems on the city of Mumbai. Perhaps early-mid 2030s. And a book of poems on a city that I have never been to, the city of my grandparent, which lies across a turbulent border. And a book of poems in Hindi, which is in the works.

Thank you for taking time to speak with The Wise Owl. We wish you the very best in all your future creative endeavours.