Dr. Anamika is a prominent contemporary Indian poet, social worker and novelist writing in Hindi, and a critic writing in English. She has eight collections of poetry, five novels and four works of criticism in her credit. Currently, she is Reader at the Department of English, Satyawati College, University of Delhi.
Anamika was born on 17 August 1961 in Muzaffarpur, Bihar. Her father Shyamnandan Kishore was a Hindi poet and her "first teacher in poetry". Anamika describes herself as a very lonely child who led a very isolated life in a huge household. Her only companions were the books from her father's library. She says reading these books, living a life of imagination and listening to her "aunts, classmates, other women, women in distress," their stories and their pain shaped her understanding of women, whose socially-constructed femininity she learnt to deconstruct and question after studying the work of poets like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Marge Piercy, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.
Anamika studied at the Universities of Bihar, Muzaffarpur, Lucknow and Delhi. Her PhD thesis was on "Donne Criticism through the Ages" and her post-doctoral research on "The Treatment of Love and Death in Post-war American Women Poets". Her current topic of research as a fellow at Teen Murti Bhawan, Delhi is "A Comparative Study of Women in Contemporary British and Hindi poetry".
Poetry Compilation by Dr. Anamika, the first women to win the Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry in Hindi