Mona Arshi

Mona Arshi is a British poet. She won the Forward Prize for Poetry, Best First Collection in 2015 for her work Small Hands.

Biography
Arshi was educated at Lampton Comprehensive School and grew up in an Indian Sikh family from Punjab in Hounslow. She studied at Guildford College of Law and University College London and the London School of Economics (LSE), where she obtained a master's degree in human rights law in 2002. She trained as a solicitor in the civil liberties law firm JR Jones Solicitors. She then worked for several years as a litigator at the NGO Liberty acting on high-profile judicial review cases including Diane Pretty's "right to die" case, asylum destitution cases and death in custody cases.

Poetry
Arshi began writing poetry in 2008 and went on to study creative writing (Poetry) at the University of East Anglia (MA Creative Writing, 2010) gaining a distinction. While studying, she won the inaugural Magma poetry competition for her poem "Hummingbird" and was a winner in the Troubadour International Competition (2013) for her poem "Bad Day in the Office". Arshi was part of The Complete Works mentoring programme. In 2013, The Huffington Post named her one of "Five Poets to Watch". In 2014, she was joint winner in the Manchester creative writing competition with a portfolio of five poems.

In 2015, she published her debut collection of poems Small Hands with Pavilion Poetry, a new poetry imprint from Liverpool University Press under the editorship of poet and critic Deryn Rees-Jones. The poet George Szirtes said of Small Hands: "It is rare to find a first book as beautiful as this", and The Times journalist and author Sathnam Sanghera praised Arshi as "Nothing less than Britain's most promising writer". Her poems "The Lion" and "Phone call on a train Journey" from Small Hands were published in The Guardian and The Sunday Times. Her poem "This Morning" appeared on posters across the London Underground, as part of the British Council's "Indian Poems on the Underground" project in 2017. Arshi went on to judge the Forward Prize for Poetry in 2017 http://www.forwardartsfoundation.org and hosted the Awards with Andrew Marr at the Royal Festival Hall. Arshi has also judged the Magma Poetry Competition and the Outspoken Poetry Prize http://www.outspokenldn.com/tnc. She also judged the Manchester Creative Writing Prize in 2017.

In 2017, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Arshi's commissioned poem "Odysseus, The Patron Saint of Foreigners?" In 2018 she was asked to read at the First Stuart Hall Public Conversation.

Arshi's second book, Dear Big Gods, was published in April 2019, also by Pavilion Poetry. The title poem and an essay, "On Gods, Human Rights and the Poet", were published in the US magazine POETRY in 2019. In the essay, Arshi comments: "A poem is not a human rights instrument or the pleadings in a court case, nor should it seek to be but one activity that the human rights lawyer and poet share is the restless interrogation of language....Poetry needs to continue to strive to make space for itself and think the unthinkable, the unimaginable on the page." Andrew Motion praised Arshi's second book as "Beautifully direct, and delivered a kind of instantaneousness that I admired a lot. The diction very clean, too, and the forms involving in their twists and turns".

Prose
In 2021, Arshi's debut novel Somebody Loves You was published by And Other Stories. In 2022, it was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and Goldsmiths Prize and longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize. The novel was named book of the week in The Telegraph and This Week magazine.

Poetry

 * Small Hands, 2015 (Liverpool University Press)
 * Dear Big Gods, 2019 (Liverpool University Press)

Short story collections

 * Somebody Loves You, 2021 (And Other Stories)