Rishi Dastidar is a poet, editor and educator. An alumnus of The Complete Works, his debut poetry collection Ticker Tape was published in 2018. His second collection Saffron Jack (2020) was included in the Guardian Review as one of the ‘Best Recent Poetry Collections’ that year. He is the editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (2019), and co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika's Poetry Kitchen (2021). He teaches widely and develops workshops and courses for organisations including The Poetry School and the Arvon Foundation. Of his writing, he says: ‘at root, what I really like doing is putting too much – subjects, phrases, energy – into traditional forms (mostly Western) and seeing what happens. I like the sense of the lyric poem almost breaking with the strain of trying to encompass the world in it.’ Dastidar is a consulting editor at The Rialto magazine and member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. He serves as Chair of writer development organisation Spread The Word.
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