Priya K, 23 • Poet

With the world bustling past in fast forward, and her peers obsessed in building careers invested in moneymaking schemes, Priya K stands still amidst all the chaos. She hangs around public spheres, people watching, eavesdropping on surrounding scattered conversations and emotions to continue them in liquid staccato.

At the tender age of 23, Priya has established oblivion to employment and stability to explore and release her abundance of repressed creative juice via poetry. While having written strings of print since she was able to grasp the pencil, Priya’s calling came in primary school, upon exposure to the whimsically significant musical stylings of the Beatles and Bob Dylan. With a lack of musical incline, she began to write her stanzas anyway, eventually getting her work published to independent acclaim.

Nowadays, Priya organizes the bi-monthly Project OMG at Dram Projects to help cement and cultivate the performance poetry scene in KL. And even in her youth, she has begun to give back in the form of conducting workshops for teenagers.

“At the beginning of each course, I ask, ‘What does a poet look like?’ and the answer is synonymous, along the lines of Shakespeare. They see poetry as beyond them, as something in need of top class English Literature grades. But it’s rewarding to see the workshop run its course for everyone to end up producing pieces that are meaningful and ironically better than what we see in local textbooks and published works,” she enthuses.

bo • dayn • helena • jana • jordan • justin • michelle • priya • raj • sandee