Raman Mundair

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Raman Mundair

Raman Mundair, Shetland author resident at Walls, was born in Ludhiana, India and grew up in England. She took up the post of Writer-in-Residence in Shetland in 2003, a role which she performed with great success.

Raman is a poet, playwright, live artist and visual artist who has appeared at venues throughout the world, including the National Theatre of Namibia, the Royal Festival Hall in London, the Commonwealth Institute, and the Museum of Modern Art in Finland. She was formerly British Council Writer in Residence at the University of Stockholm and is currently Scottish Arts Council Writing Fellow at Glasgow Women's Library.

She has featured on BBC Radio 4's Women's Hour, BBC London, BBC Asian Network, and the BBC World Service; and has taught at The Open University, Florida International University, University of Aberystwyth, University of Portsmouth, and Roehampton University. In 2004, she took part in the ArchiTexts project, writing a commissioned piece in response to the Chattri Memorial near Brighton.

Raman Mundair's first poetry collection was Lovers, Liars, Conjurors and Thieves (2003), and her second collection, A Choreographer's Cartography, written partially in Shetland dialect, was published in 2007. She comments that her poetry is multi-lingual and although the primary language is English, she uses Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu and Shetland dialect to create an inter-textual narrative within the poems – something that she refers to as ‘windows into worlds within worlds within worlds’. As an artist, she makes work that represents text and narrative in a visual form. Her play, The Algebra of Freedom, is in development.