These poems by Amal Mathew and Satya Dash have won the 2026 Osmosis Poetry Prize

The Osmosis Poetry Prize was instituted in 2025 by poets Yashasvi Vachhani, Kunjana Parashar, and Kinjal Sethia. The aim of the prize is to celebrate contemporary Indian poets writing in English. It is awarded to two poets, each winning a cash reward of Rs 10,000 and a citation from an external judge. This year, the prize has been won by poets Amal Mathew and Satya Dash. Translator and writer Rohan Chhetri was the external judge this year.

Chhetri said that “Amal Mathew’s poems arrive in dense blocks of prose poetry – troubled, baroque, and voiced by a speaker who is by turns a deconstructed Oedipus, by turns Orpheus. Rooted in both the mythic and the personal, these poems read as lyric explorations towards an elaborate, interconnected personal fable. At times they speak of homecoming, of a hometown but it is the hometown of Juan Rulfo’s Comala in Pedro Páramo, and like all hometowns in literature, it is a ghost town where one must return ‘for the speaking of a lifetime’. The poems themselves seem spoken in the register of an otherworldly voice – one the poet-speaker is only visiting. Polyphonic and ambitious, drawing on art, allegory, and hagiography, they are circuitous...

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