Abrona's story

Abrona Lee Pandi Aden is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Sikkim University, India where she teaches courses on Literature from India’s Northeast, Literature and Gender, Creative Writing and Translation.

She belongs to the Lepcha community indigenous to Sikkim and the Darjeeling hills. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Muse India, Mekong Review, Sapiens Anthropology Magazine, The Bangalore Review, among others.

She is a recipient of the ICM Global South Translation Fellowship awarded by the Institute of Comparative Modernities, Cornell University, in 2022. She was a Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Kent, during their Spring Term, 2024.

CWIT enabled me to think deeply about my work as a writer and an academic, of how I could build a conscious and sustainable writing practice. The fellowship fortified my convictions to pursue work that dwells on writing as resistance, poetry as truth-telling, self-healing, community-healing and ultimately, freedom.

This experience was important because for the first time, I felt I had an empathetic audience, that poetry and storytelling mattered, that people cared, that art has a voice, a force and a pace of its own.

All the wonderful people that I met at the University of Kent, the friendships I forged, the readings in Kent and the University of Stirling that generated thoughtful and empathetic engagement, the learning I got to do through so many experiences have not only helped me write more, but to write with care, with sensitivity, with a view towards sustainability.

Abrona Lee Pandi Aden