Kiran Bath in-conversation with Jazz Money and Sara M Saleh

In her debut poetry collection, Kiran Bath travels through the timelines and geographies of the women in her family to understand the inherited consequences of becoming a South Asian bride (banno). 

Threading stories of pre-partition matriarchs, migrant mothers, and first generation daughters, she renders themes of subjugation, domestic violence, honor killings, and infanticide alongside unrequited love, sisterhood, motherhood, and devotion in cathartic form. 

The result is the set of instructions left for BANNO, a diary that ruptures the institution of filial duty and embodies the tradition that survives it—an insistence for declaring our humanity.

Kiran Bath’s much anticipated debut INSTRUCTIONS FOR BANNO was released this July with Kelsey Street Press. She has received fellowships and support from Poets House, the Vermont Studio Center and Brooklyn Poets. Kiran is a Kundiman fellow and a Tin House alumnus. Her writing appears in wildness, The Adroit Journal, The Brooklyn Rail and other journals. She is currently based in Brooklyn and maintains infrequent musings in The Aftermoss.

Jazz Money is a Wiradjuri poet and artist producing works that encompass installation, digital, performance, film and print. Their writing and art has been presented, performed and published nationally and internationally, and their feature film WINHANGANHA (2023) was commissioned by the National Film and Sound Archive. Jazz’s first poetry collection, the best-selling how to make a basket (UQP, 2021) won the David Unaipon Award. Their second collection is mark the dawn, which was the recipient of the 2024 UQP Quentin Bryce Award.

Sara M Saleh is a writer/poet, human rights lawyer, and the daughter of Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian migrants. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published widely and she is co-editor of the ground-breaking 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity. Her first novel is Songs for the Dead and the Living (Affirm Press, 2023), which was shortlisted for the 2024 NSW Premier’s Awards. Her first poetry collection is The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat (UQP, 2023), which was shortlisted for the 2024 ALS Gold Medal and won the Anne Elder Award.

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