India-born poet Yuyutsu Sharma is known as a “Himalayan poet,” as he has spent years in the Himalayas in Nepal listening to the silence of the mountains and using that as an inspiration to write poems. However, the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, which killed at least 9,000 people, shattered his celebration of the quietude that he had been relishing. That’s when he wrote a series of poems on the calamity, published earlier this year as a book, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems.
In this video interview with The Diplomat, held in Kathmandu in June 2017, the poet recalls his emotional reaction to the earthquake, and recites stanzas from his poems.