Akhil Katyal

Akhil Katyal (born 1985 in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh)^[1] is an Indian poet, translator, scholar and a queer activist.^[2]

Akhil Katyal in 2025

Career

Katyal has published four books of poems: The Last Time I Saw You, Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems, How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross, and Night Charge Extra.^{[3][4][5][6][7][8][9]} During fall 2016, he was an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa.^[10] He was the recipient of the Vijay Nambisan Poetry Fellowship for the year 2021. In 2018, he translated Ravish Kumar's book of Hindi poems Ishq Mein Shahar Hona as A City Happens in Love.^[11] In 2020, he co-edited The World that Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia.^[12] His work appears in Jeet Thayil (ed.) The Penguin Book of Indian Poets (2022).^[13] In the summer of 2022, he guest edited a special issue on 'New Indian English Poetry' for Poetry at Sangam.^[14]

Katyal is from Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. He has taught creative writing at Ambedkar University Delhi.^[15]