Rahul Bishnoi

OCLW’s Global Majority and Underrepresented Writers’ Programme is a highly competitive initiative offering eight scholarships to life-writers whose voices have historically been marginalised in publishing and academia. Alongside dedicated seminars and lectures, scholars receive skills training, mentorship, and community support. The Programme aims to ensure that the future of life-writing more fully reflects the broad and diverse range of voices that surround us.

Agents and publishers are warmly encouraged to contact scholars directly.

Rahul Bishnoi is a theatre practitioner and performance studies researcher from India whose work investigates the poetics of space and the role of narrative cartography in playwriting. He holds an MA in Society and Culture from IIT Gandhinagar and has received numerous honours for his interdisciplinary contributions, including the President’s Gold Medal, the Institute Gold Medal, the Villa Swagatam Award, and the French+Sciences Scholarship. In September 2025, he will begin a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts University.

Life-writing is central to both his creative and academic practice. His theatre direction, including Gulzar’s Kharashein (2018) and Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (2023), draws on biographical narratives, from the lived experiences of migrants during India’s Partition to the intimate realities of recovery after a suicide attempt. His academic work has also examined how Dalit authors use biography to challenge caste-dominated literary spaces, particularly through the novels of Dalpat Chauhan.

Project Details:

During his time at OCLW, Rahul will write a biography of his mother, composed of vignettes that incorporate poetry, images, and conversations. The work listens to her voice as she reflects on a childhood of precarity in 1970s India, a young marriage in a harsh household, and her journey raising two children with love and resilience. This life-writing project aims to portray his mother’s personhood—her labour, language, and dreams—while capturing the shared ‘stuttering articulation’ between mother and son. Rahul intends to share this work as a published book and as a staged performance.

Selected Publications/Projects:

Rahul’s academic work includes essays and reviews published or forthcoming in Digital Culture & Society and Doing Sociology, as well as with Edinburgh University Press and CEPT University Press. His writing engages questions of disobedience, decay, and literary form in both canonical and contemporary texts. He has also presented on the political function of biography in Dalit literary movements, with a paper on Dalpat Chauhan’s prose delivered at the 2nd Ayyankali Conference. Alongside his academic work, Rahul has written and directed numerous performances staged across leading Indian institutes.

A selection of his creative and critical work can be found here.

Contact Details:

Email: rahul.bishnoi@tufts.edu

Website: www.rahulbishnoi.in