with Rishi Dastidar. Postcards for strangers.

First broadcast 14 March 2022

Rishi Dastidar, is a poet and copywriter⁠. Rishi’s poetry has been published by the BBC, the Financial Times and the New Scientist, amongst many others. His ⁠second collection, entitled Saffron Jack⁠, is published by Nine Arches Press. Rishi is also co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, and he serves as chair of the writer development organisation ⁠Spread The Word.⁠ Rishi has written for many different brands over the course of his career in copywriting, and was recently a judge for D&AD.

⁠Rishi’s unfinished project is Self-Portrait Postcards⁠, which began when he started writing down all of his Facebook updates (filling over fifty notebooks in the process). Rishi ended up ⁠collaborating with the designed Matt Busher to create an exhibition⁠ in which his updates were displayed on postcards, with visitors invited to choose one to take away with them.

For those who are interested, the unfinished novels Rishi mentions in our conversation are ⁠Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura ⁠and ⁠David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.