main page Zeitgeister The Cultural Magazine of the Goethe-Institut

Joshua Muyiwa

Joshua Muyiwa

Joshua Muyiwa started writing because he was told, “it is time to stop seeming arty and pretentious and actually earn the tags by doing something”. He is queer. He presently writes on arts and culture and queer life and on television for News 9. He has worked as an editor at the magazine TimeOut Bangalore, has written a weekly column in the Bangalore Mirror – Gazing Outwards – that talked about race, sexuality, art and the police force in the city for seven years.

He has written for publications like The Week, Tehelka, Hindu Businessline, Firstpost, Mint Lounge, Fifty-Two.in, Chimurenga, LensCulture, Conde Nast Traveller and The Goya Journal
among others. He is a poet and has won the Toto Award for Creative Writing in English in 2012 for The Catalogue, a series of nine poems on the history of photography and poetry told through the relationship between a photographer and a poet. His poems have been published in Poetry with Prakriti, The World That Belongs To Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia and elsewhere. And he makes poetry-performances like Come, Lie With Me, where strangers were invited to a one-on-one poetry reading experience in an exact replication of the poet's bedroom. He is also one of the founding organisers of the Bangalore Queer Film Festival.

Contributions by Joshua Muyiwa