Mona Arshi

Mona Arshi was born in West London to Punjabi parents. She worked as a human rights lawyer at Liberty before she started writing poetry. Her debut collection Small Hands won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2015. Her second collection Dear Big Gods was published in April 2019 (both books were published by Liverpool University Press’s Pavilion Poetry list). She won the inaugural Magma Poetry Competition in 2011, was joint winner in 2014 of the Manchester Poetry Prize and a prizewinner of the Troubadour Poetry Prize. Her poems and interviews have been published in The Times, The Guardian, Granta and The Times of India as well as on the London Underground. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of Liverpool. Since judging the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2020, Mona has published a debut novel Somebody Loves You (And Other Stories, 2021), with her third collection, Mouth, published by Penguin in 2025. Author photo © Amanda Pepper Photography

www.monaarshi.com