“But I never felt like I had that role model in football. So there was hesitation in joining the football club, knowing that I would be the only Asian player out there.”
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‘I don’t think that self-care and social responsibility can be separable in these times.’
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‘Dialogue is often sparring: listening, absorbing, deflecting, anticipating.’
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‘We’re not in poetry for the fame or the money, but for the love of it. Hold on to that as much as you can.’
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‘One day sitting on my dad’s shoulders, I saw heaps of rubble, but while turning my head my eyes caught the shimmering sight of the Jarrahi river. It was a striking contrast that lingered in my mind.’
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‘I suspect the most important public intellectuals didn’t set out to be public intellectuals.’
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‘Our compulsion to tie our sense of belonging to something concrete is linked to our innate desire to be accepted or to be perceived in a certain way.’
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‘Carving out time to attend and facilitate discussions about books, to float in the realm of ideas, is like oxygen.’
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‘I think our other task as writers is to understand, and treat seriously, the feedback loop of stories and reality.’
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‘There was a time when I wondered if opening my heart to other places made me less Pakistani. If writing poetry in English, and not Urdu, made me less authentic. But over time, something has changed.’
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‘Living as a minority in two multicultural societies has brought challenges, but not adversity.’
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‘Art and language are cultural products, and culture by definition is communal and cumulative—texts, too, have genealogies; they move beyond their makers.’
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‘Coming across that casual reference to Melbourne as a publishing backwater was sobering, and a reminder that for all that new technologies have lowered the cost of entry, cultural behemoths are still created in a few geographic centres.’
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‘Though I admire memoirists very much, and in the glory of the internet age, the personal essayist, I can’t write like them. Yet all my poems are rooted inside my life...’
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‘As a person of colour, in the arts it’s an exciting time where for the first time it feels like voices and stories from diverse communities can just ‘be’, rather than curtailing to a white framework as a given.’
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‘Fantasy literature shaped me wholly... fantasy as a mode is about transformation & so is poetry itself. It rearranges the possible.’
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'I do not have very strong boundaries between my private and creative self: so many of my own interests and passions bleed right into my work.'
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'I didn't plan on becoming a poet. I ended up doing this because I love it. And you need to do what you love just to take care of yourself. The world is hard enough as it is.'
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