Why you should read Odia author Nilesh Mondal's new book

Though Nilesh Mondal was pursuing his engineering from National Power Training Institute, Durgapur in West Bengal, he used to borrow books that were a part of the syllabus of those majoring in English and read them. That's when he started to fall in love with poetry. Today, he works at Vedanta Limited, Lanjigarh, Odisha and is called for guest lectures at several colleges including KIIT. He has been a writer for the popular flash fiction platform Terribly Tiny Tales.

When I started reading contemporary poets, I realised the poetry need not be hard or complex

Nilesh Mondal, Writer

Nilesh's first book of poetry, Degrees of Separation, was out last year. It has been published by the Kolkata-based Writers Workshop. He was determined to publish with them or not at all. "Honestly, I started writing found a purpose in writing. I felt there was a certain permeance in my art when I put it out there in the world," says the 25-year-old, whose first book featured on the second place on Amazon's Bestsellers List.

All his poetry, says Nilesh, starts with a story which becomes the crux. Like for his third book, which has been in the works for more than a year, documents all that he experienced while travelling to different cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Varanasi, Lucknow and others. He has even dabbled in slam poetry, prose and other forms of expression. We wonder if it's exhausting to use multiple mediums to express oneself. "I keep shifting because I don't want to get comfortable in one medium and I don't want people to stereotype me either," he says confidently. When people reach out to him on social media and tell him that his work helped them get over a rough patch in life, he feels that he has accomplished at least a little of what he set out to do because, "I write to tell people that they and their stories matter," says Nilesha.