Nabin Prachin is a Nepali poet and prose writer based in Woodstock, Ontario, whose work is marked by lyric introspection, spiritual questioning, and a sustained attention to migration, memory, and moral self-examination. Born in Khajurgachhi, Jhapa,   in southeastern Nepal, and raised in Damak, he grew up in a household in which literature and public life were closely linked. His parents were Krishna Prasad and Kanta Misra. His father, a Sanskrit pandit, wrote and staged plays with an avowed reformist purpose, participated in Nepal’s democratic movement of the 1990s, ran a library for several years, and hosted poetry readings in Khajurgachhi when Nabin  was still a child. That environment helped shape his earliest sense of literature as both an artistic and a public practice.

His literary formation deepened when his father later opened a bookshop, giving him access to newspapers, magazines, and books. He read newspapers such as Nepal Samacharpatra and children’s magazines such as Muna. His early reading included novels by Prakash Kovid, books by Osho, and Nepali romances named after their principal characters, such as Bir Sikka, Madhumalatiko Katha, and Lal Hirako Katha, as well as a collection of short Nepali poems about morality and good habits, Gunaratna Mala (The Garland of Virtuous Jewels). He later moved toward a wider literary field, reading Krishna Dharabasi’s novel Radha, Sarubhakta’s Pagal Basti (Lunatic Town), Daulat Vikram Bista’s Chapaiyeka Anuhar (Oppressed Faces), Russian and Chinese novels including Maxim Gorky’s Mother and Yang Mo’s Song of Youth, and works by Paulo Coelho and Gabriel García Márquez. He was also drawn to the reflective and aphoristic strains associated with Rumi, Khalil Gibran, and Rabindranath Tagore.

Prachin pursued higher education within Tribhuvan University. As an undergraduate at Damak Multiple Campus, he became active in the Damak Campus Literary Forum, which organized poetry readings and produced Sarathi Hawai Patrika, a literary magazine circulated in a postal-letter format. He had begun writing poetry in school, then turned for a period to the ghazal before returning to free verse. During these years, he encountered poets such as Ramesh Sayan, Ramesh Chandra Adhikari, Seema Avas, Heman Yatri, Manu Manjil, Suman Pokharel, and Upendra Subba. Subba’s poetry encouraged him to attend more closely to tonal freshness and local detail, while Manjil’s support proved especially important at a formative moment.

He later moved to Kathmandu for graduate study in business at Shankardev Campus, also within Tribhuvan University. In Kathmandu, his writing began to circulate more widely, and he published articles and short stories in venues such as Kantipur Koseli and Saptahik. His first major book publication was Ubhiyera Eklai: Standing Alone   (2016), a bilingual volume that presented his Nepali poems in English translation by Balram Adhikari. Ubhiyera Eklai: Standing Alone is concerned largely with solitude, moral endurance, self-recognition, and the pressure of ordinary life on inward being. The volume begins with “That Someone,” which imagines an unnamed sustaining figure whose compassion makes endurance possible. Another poem, “The Lifespan,” contrasts fragility and resilience through the figures of a mushroom and a peepal tree:

A mushroom

Is ever in search of dampness

Of a support to stand

It cries for comfort in life

So it lives a short life, very short

Carving the path itself,

A peepal tree grows,

Challenging the rocks. (77)

The contrast is ethical as much as imagistic. Dependence and endurance become alternative ways of inhabiting the world, and the poem asks whether one seeks shelter alone or acquires the strength to shelter others.

That same volume includes “Courage,” which turns the act of looking in the mirror into a test of self-confrontation, and “This Time Too,” where rising onion prices briefly provoke dreams of revolt: “Upon hearing the price of onions, we dreamt of a revolution. This time too” (147). The line is at once ironic and exact. It registers how political feeling may flare up in response to economic hardship and then subside just as quickly under the pressure of routine life. Even when Prachin’s poems glance outward toward public frustration, they tend to return to inward moral weather rather than declamatory statement.

“My Last Wish” extends this meditative current in an elegiac register. The poem imagines departure through unstable forms—cloud shapes, footprints on sand, fragrance in the wind—and asks what, if anything, remains after bodily presence has vanished. Breath, heartbeat, and vision become figures for mortal brevity. Yet the poem also seeks continuity, not through monumentality but through transmission: the speaker’s dream may endure in the reader’s eyes. In this respect, Ubhiyera Eklai: Standing Alone is less a book of confession than a book of ethical inwardness, one in which mortality sharpens attention rather than extinguishing relation.

In 2018, Prachin moved to Canada to join his wife and later settled in Ontario. Migration introduced a new emotional and imaginative geography into his writing without severing it from Nepal. In the essay “Ghar” (“Home” 2023),  he reflects on home not as a fixed place but as a shifting relation among memory, domestic life, absence, and attachment. Canada appears there neither as simple arrival nor as mere exile, but as a setting in which earlier worlds are recalled, tested, and reinterpreted.

In addition to writing, Prachin has also been active in Nepali cultural work in Canada. He became involved with the Samasa Foundation, a community-based cultural organization, and in 2019 took part in Mystic Echoes, a performance project combining poetry and orchestral presentation in Windsor, Ontario, and Buffalo, New York. He has also participated in community events including film screenings and cultural programs. These activities clarify that his literary life has remained tied to collective cultural work, not confined to publication alone.

His later collection, Pwankh (Feather), published in 2022, marks an important formal development. Unlike Ubhiyera Eklai: Standing Alone, Pwankh consists entirely of untitled poems. In an interview  with Ganesh Bista in Sahityapost (2023), Prachin explains that he resists titling poems because titles can narrow a poem’s range and constrain its movement ; the title Pwankh itself emerged, in his account, spontaneously rather than programmatically. The collection’s structure therefore asks the reader to move through the book by tonal relation, recurring imagery, and conceptual echo rather than by the guidance of separate titles.

Several of the untitled poems in Pwankh pursue metaphysical questions in plain but resonant language. One poem asks:

ananta brahmandama ko vyapta cha?

 ko sangitaka jhankarma bascha?

jivanko amrita piuncha?  (63)

The questions—who pervades the infinite universe? who lives in the resonance of music? who drinks the nectar of life?—do not lead to doctrine. Instead, they stage wonder as a mode of inquiry. The poem moves between cosmic address and intimate human feeling, asking who makes one weep and who makes one laugh on the road alone. Its repeated question, “Who is that?,” leaves the divine elusive but not absent. What matters is not theological resolution but the suggestion that rhythm, beauty, sorrow, and companionship may all be sites where transcendence is felt without being possessed.

Another untitled poem, beginning “aau, / ekchhin baat maraun” (“come, / let us talk for a moment”),  develops a poetics of purposeless conversation and aesthetic release:

aau,

ek chhin baat maraun

bina kunai uddeshya, sandharbha

niyamharu banne

niyamharu bhanda para (90)

come,

let’s talk for a moment

without any purpose, context

beyod the rules that make the rules

The phrasing rejects utility and regulation in favour of presence, encounter, and imaginative attention. The poem continues:

jangali  phoolako sugandhale latthiyeko

kunai fakirako

ardhacheti sapnajasto

kavitaka komal paitala

bhanirahanchan sadhain

ma eka chu

jo har pal

niyamaka damlama bandieko chu.  (90)

Intoxicated by the fragrance

of wild flowers,

like the half-conscious dream

of some fakir,

the tender feet of poetry

keep saying, always,

I am the one

who, at every moment,

is bound in the chains of rules.

The fragrance of wildflowers, the half-conscious dream of a fakir, and the soft footsteps of poetry are set against the speaker’s awareness of living bound within rules. The poem’s force lies in that tension. Freedom is vividly imagined, but it is imagined from within structure, not outside it.

The final short poem in Pwankh returns to brevity and impermanence through the figure of a “stray wave” that comes only to touch the earth’s feet before withdrawing again. The image is modest, and that modesty is part of its power. Human presence is figured as passing contact rather than possession, and the poem closes the collection with a sense of lightness achieved through relinquishment.

Nabin Prachin’s contribution to Nepali writing in Canada lies in this continuity between literary inheritance and diasporic reorientation. He belongs to a formation shaped by eastern Nepal, campus literary culture, Kathmandu print circulation, and translation, yet his later work is also distinctly marked by migration, altered belonging, and reflective distance. His poems are not expansive in manner, but they are attentive, disciplined, and quietly resonant. They carry into the Canadian context a Nepali lyric tradition concerned with self-scrutiny, moral relation, and metaphysical reach, while testing how those concerns change under migration. In the emerging archive of Nepali literary presence in Canada, he occupies a meaningful place as a writer who joins literary concentration to cultural continuity.

References

Bista, Ganesh (Jonash). “On Being a Feather.” Sahityapost, 3 June 2023, https://english.sahityapost.com/on-being-a-feather/.

Prachin, Nabin, and DG Sharma. “Kavitamathi Kunai Manyata Bannuaghi Kavita ‘Lekhana’ Chhutos Mero.” Sahityapost, 10 Dec. 2023, https://sahityapost.com/interview/129962/.

Prachin, Nabin. “Chhuteko Burma, Nachhuteko Burma.” Setopati,

Prachin, Nabin. “Chupchap Jane Sathiko Namama.” Shilapatra, 12 Aug. 2017, https://shilapatra.com/detail/50507.

Prachin, Nabin. “Ghar.” Onlinekhabar, 16 Dec. 2023, https://www.onlinekhabar.com/2023/12/1406099.

Prachin, Nabin. “Jogile Sunayera Gayeko Kura.” Onlinekhabar, 23 Jan. 2024, https://www.onlinekhabar.com/2024/01/1419229.

Prachin, Nabin. “Mohammad Nabeen Khan.” Onlinekhabar, 25 Nov. 2023, https://www.onlinekhabar.com/2023/11/1396629.

Prachin, Nabin. “Peter.” Onlinekhabar, 2 Mar. 2024, https://www.onlinekhabar.com/2024/03/1443171.

Prachin, Nabin. Pwankh. Nepalaya, 2022.

Prachin, Nabin. Ubhiyera Eklai: Standing Alone. Translated by Balram Adhikari, Ratna Pustak Bhandar, 2016.

Prasad, Raju Jhallu. “Nabin Prachinsanga Pwankhka Kura.” Himal Darpan, 16 July 2022, https://www.himaldarpan.com/news/nawin-prachin/.