Maya Chowdhry

Maya Chowdhry (born 1964) is a British playwright, poet and transmedia interactive artist.

Life

Maya Chowdhry was born in Edinburgh in 1964.^[1] She began writing as an adolescent:

I began writing to stay above water; I wrote to survive teenage years: crushes, exams, obsessional cooking – my poetry was a life-line. When my poetry was published I was asked to read at the launch – to perform my life. It slipped easily off the tongue: I had had years of performing answers to society's questions about my identities; I had written about the questions, searching for my true identity. Readings became performances, multi-media shows, commissions. Suddenly my identity was captured, fractured, sliced and served to audiences and I was a 'live' challenge to myself.^[2]

Chowdhry worked for Sheffield Film Co-op in the 1980s, and wrote theatre for young people in the 1990s.^[3] Like other black women playwrights such as Jackie Kay and Jacqueline Rudet, Chowdhry was helped by the appointment of the black woman producer Frances-Anne Solomon to BBC Radio 4.

Chowdhry's first play, Monsoon (1993), was broadcast as part of the BBC Young Playwrights' Festival.^[4] Monsoon portrays the return of sisters Jalaarnava and Kavitaa, two second-generation migrant young women, to their parents' birthplace in India.^[5] The play parallels the experience of menstruation with waiting for the seasonal monsoon.^[4] Chowdhry's play Kaahini (1997) was toured by Red Ladder, as one of a series of plays aimed primarily at Asian-British girls. Influenced by the story of Shikhandi in the Mahabharata, the play dramatizes a gender reversal narrative:^[4] a British Indian teenage girl, Esha, is brought up by her parents as a boy. After a close friend Farooq falls in love with Esha, she reveals herself to him as a girl and is forced to work through her gender identity.^[6]

In 2000 Chowdhry moved into digital work, and received an Arts Council Year of the Artist Award for her digital work destinyNation.^[3]

In 2015 Chowdhry collaborated with poet Sarah Hymas on "poetic sculptures" exploring the fragility of life and anthropogenic climate change.^[7]

In April 2020 Chowdhry was awarded a COVID-19 Creative Commission from Greater Manchester Combined Authority.^[8]

Works

Plays

• (with Jag Rahi Hai) Putting in the Pickle Where the Jam Should Be, Write Back, 1989.
• Monsoon. In Monsoon: Six Plays By Black & Asian Women, Aurora Metro Press, 1993.
• The Crossing Path. In New Plays for Young People, Faber and Faber, 2003.
• Kaahini. Edinburgh: Capercaillie, 2004.

Other writing

• Contributions in As Girls Could Boast: New Poetry by Women, 1994.
• "Living Performance". Journal of Lesbian Studies. Volume 2, 1998. doi:10.1300/J155v02n02_02
• 'Healing Strategies for Women at War', in Seven Black Women Poets, Crocus Press, 1999.
• "k/not theory; a self dialogue", Journal of Lesbian Studies. Volume 4, 2000. doi:10.1300/J155v04n04_05
• (ed. with Mary Sharratt) Bitch Lit. Manchester: Crocus, 2006.
• The seamstress and the global garment. Manchester : Crocus debuts/Suitcase, 2009.
• Fossil. Leeds, England: Peepal Tree, 2016.