Ankita Saxena

Ankita Saxena is a British-Indian poet and performer. She is a member of the Octavia poetry collective for womxn of colour, led by Rachel Long, the 2021 Apples and Snakes Writing Room, and a former Barbican Young Poet. She is one half of the poetry duo, ORIGINS. 

Her poetry is published in Wasafiri, Modern Poetry in Translation and Bath Magg. She has performed widely across the UK, most recently at the Wasafiri New Writing Prize celebration, English PEN’s Sisterhood and Solidarity event at the Southbank Centre, the South Asian Heritage month Newham Unlocked Festival and Gutter Street.

In December 2021, in celebration of International Migrants Day she curated and co-hosted ORIGINS Poetry Night – an interdisciplinary arts event at POP Brixton, which sold out and raised over £500 for Migration Museum. The event featured poets Abena Essah and Repeat Beat Poet, as well as a host of other artists including life writer and academic SJ Kim and DJ, Noudle. 

She read English at Oxford, where she was Head of Events at Oxford University Poetry Society, and won the Isis Magazine ‘Borders and Bodies’ competition for her poem ‘Partition’. She has been commended in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award three times.

She has been commissioned by St James’ Piccadilly, The Poetry Society and St Paul’s Cathedral, and facilitated workshops for Shakespeare’s Globe, the Wellcome Collection, Lacuna Lit and the Orwell Youth Prize. She has been a headliner at Dead Women Poets Society and featured poet at the Stay at Home Festival.