Amrutha Manoj was born and raised in Kochi, and now lives in Dubai. She works as a Data Artist, which funds the rest of her life, though she often wishes poems were currency.
When asked what she prefers doing, she says “hmm” and means it. Most days, she’s reading, writing, or painting, depending on what the day gave her and what it took away. What she wants, more than certainty perhaps, is the ability to name what haunts her without softening it. She prefers to make sense of the world in comparisons, not absolutes.
So, she chooses Kochi over Dubai, rain over sun, rice over wheat, freedom over femininity, feminism over faith, Woolf over Faulkner, Orwell over Joyce, Mohanlal over Mammootty, absurdism over ideology and discomfort over denial, every time.
The rest, she’s still arguing with.
Q: How do you think your craft of poetry helps you in your career of a Data Artist?
To me, they're separate rooms in the same house. Sometimes I notice I arrange charts the way I'd arrange a line in a stanza, but that's probably just pattern-seeking. These days I type my poems rather than write them in notebooks - another choice I've made without examining. But both involve similar gestures—an awful lot of screen time, looking for patterns, removing what doesn't serve, believing in clarity. But yes, at the end of the day, I feel good about both, which is suspicious. Maybe they're not as separate as I pretend.
Q: Your poems are deeply embedded in the cityscape. Do you think places, in a way, are your muses?
I suppose I would resist the word muse because to me it sounds romantic and inspiring. I mostly write about where I am because I'm there at that moment. And as for Kochi, it surfaces the way my mother tongue does - without warning, mid-sentence, like muscle memory I can't shut off.
So I think places simply leak into my work whether I want them to or not. Or maybe they become muses in hindsight, when distance does what distance does - make the heart grow fonder!
Q: Do you think your poems are shaped deeply by your diasporic identity?
Yes, absolutely. My poems exist somewhere between Malayalam and English, between the cities I've lived in, between who I was and who I'm becoming. I write in English and catch myself thinking in Malayalam. The displacement shows in everything - the need to name what's disappearing, the way I address "us" from thousands of kilometers away. I didn't set out to write diasporic poetry, but I guess that's what happens when you write about home from elsewhere.
THE BOOK
Amrutha has been published in the anthology 'Hear Me First'. Curated by Delhi Poetry Slam as part of The Writer's Launchpad, an online workshop series for a select group of contemporary Indian poets. Get your copy!