Winner of the Kavya Prize for Scottish Writers of Colour

Arun Sood joins us to discuss his debut novel, New Skin for the Old Ceremony: A Kirtan which won the 2024 Kavya Prize. Published by award-winning publisher 404 Ink, it is a postcolonial road novel touching on youth, memory, music and the ghosts of friendship, illustrating how colonial legacies can pervade personal histories. The form of the novel alludes to the Kirtan, a Hindu genre of storytelling focusing on music, shared narration, and spiritual ideas, but here structured in relation to the music of Leonard Cohen.

Arun Sood is a Scottish-Indian writer, musician, academic, and artist working across multiple forms.  He was born in Aberdeen to a West-Highland Mother and a Punjabi father, and has since lived in Glasgow, Amsterdam, DC, and now South Devon.  His books include the 2024 Kavya Prize-winning New Skin For The Old Ceremony: A Kirtan  (a road novel exploring notions of home, heritage, and belonging among the South Asian diaspora in Scotland) and Searching Erskine (a non-fiction artbook exploring the uninhabited island of Vallay North Uist) released with an accompanying ambient spoken word album that featured as Guardian Folk Album of the Month in 2023.  He is also the author of the academic book Robert Burns and the United States of America: Poetry, Print, and Memory, c. 1786-1886  and has published widely on Scottish and American literatures, postcolonialism, and cultural memory studies.