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Aditya Narayan
Author Bio
Aditya Narayan is a poet and performer whose work lives at the intersection of language, rhythm, and inheritance. Raised trilingual, he writes at the fault line between cultures, exploring migration, masculinity, naming, and the politics of voice. His poems are formally meticulous and musically charged, shaped by a deep engagement with metre and Indian classical rhythm.
He is the current Scottish National Slam Champion, winner of the 2025 Roundhouse Slam and the 2025 Loud Poets Grand Slam, and has featured on BBC Radio 4’s The Verb. His poems have been described as “a treasure to see,” “unbelievably talented,” and “an absolute powerhouse of rhythm and emotion,” earning acclaim for their precision, intensity, and commanding presence.
His debut pamphlet, My Name Is a Two-Person Sport, is a striking collection of poems centred on the experience of moving between countries and cultures, and the profound reshaping of identity that follows. It is a body of work that speaks to anyone who has ever felt split between worlds, and is determined to claim all of them.
Synopsis
'My Name is a Two-Person Sport' is a collection of poems that traces the emotional and linguistic repercussions of moving between countries, cultures, and versions of the self. Across airports, family homes, classrooms, offices, and imagined timelines, Aditya Narayan interrogates what it means to leave, and what refuses to leave you.
From the aching address to Dear Heathrow Airport to the restless meditation on departure in Running Out, the pamphlet circles the question of home: is it a place, a memory, a runway that disappears once you move too far?
The title poem, My Name is a Two-Person Sport, confronts the politics of mispronunciation, exposing the quiet violence of shrinking a name to fit another mouth. In Forked Tongue, colonial inheritance and linguistic pressure force the poet to split into two, before resolving in a fierce braiding of languages that chooses to combine the alternatives rather than pick between them.
Elsewhere, the collection turns inward. Memories holds a dying grandfather in the fragile glow of music and Alzheimer’s. Doubt questions the poet’s tendency to aestheticise suffering. Who Are You When No One’s Watching? dissects ambition and approval, while Not a Poet – A Palindrome Poem oscillates between impostor syndrome and artistic conviction in its very structure.
Formally varied and effortlessly rhythm-driven, this pamphlet makes you ask one question: if you split yourself across borders, languages, and expectations, who are you when you finally speak?
