Mubashira Patel wins the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize 2025
Mubashira Patel, a 26-year-old student of Sociology at Mumbai University, is the winner of the 2025 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. She was selected from among 126 competitors this year by the poet and founder-editor of the literary journal, Almost Island, Sharmistha Mohanty and two faculty members of the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad who constituted the jury. Abhilipsa Sahoo has received special mention from the jury. Mubashira, who has been writing since she was eight years old, is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Sociology and calls herself “a literature aficionado, an amateur philosopher, and a newly published poet.” Her academic work intersects with themes of marginal voices and cultural memory. Her writing often emerges alongside this inquiry, shaped by lyric form and a drive toward emotional excavation. Among her other passions are fanfiction and anime. Recognised as a significant award for creative writing in India, the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize was instituted by the Hyderabad-based Srinivas Rayaprol Literary Trust to recognize excellence in poetry written in English by poets in the age group of 20-40 years. The Prize is jointly administered by the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. The inaugural prize was awarded in 2009 to Aditi Machado and, subsequently, to Hemant Mohapatra (2010), Aditi Rao (2011), Tushar Jain (2012), Mihir Vatsa (2013), Ranjani Murali (2014), Aishwarya Iyer (2015), Goirick Brahmachari (2016), Debarshi Mitra (2017), Poorna Swami (2018), Prashant Parvataneni (2019), Satya Dash (2020), Pervin Saket (2021), Syam Sudhakar (2022), Nikita Deshpande (2023), and Ajay Kumar (2024). Eminent poets like Jeet Thayil, Sudeep Sen, Keki Daruwalla, Arundhathi Subramanian, Manohar Shetty, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote, E.V. Ramakrishnan, Gieve Patel, Mamang Dai, Vinay Dharwadker, Mani Rao, Sridala Swami, and Menka Shivdasani have previously been associated with the prize as jury members. This 17th Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, consisting of a citation and cash prize of Rs. 15,000, will be presented to the winner on October 25, 2025 on the occasion of Srinivas Rayaprol’s 100th Birth Anniversary.
