Pushpa Raj Acharya is a Toronto-based writer, scholar, and filmmaker. His writing brings together poetry, translation, comparative literary study, ecological awareness, documentary practice, and diasporic reflection. He is among the Nepali writers in Canada whose work extends beyond migration narrative to engage myth, memory, ecology, perception, language, and transnational literary form. His creative and scholarly work places Nepali literature in conversation with South Asian, postcolonial, Canadian, and world literary traditions.

Acharya holds a PhD in comparative literature and South Asian studies from the University of Toronto. He also studied comparative literature at the University of Alberta and holds an MA and MPhil in English from Tribhuvan University. His research focuses on political readings of the novel, with particular attention to empire, debt, theology, democracy, and liberalism. His earlier work examined violence and Partition literature, especially in relation to India and Pakistan. Over the years, he has taught courses on literary theory, postcolonial literature, world literature, South Asian literature, and British literature. This comparative academic background informs his creative and critical work, which often brings South Asian, postcolonial, and transnational literary traditions into conversation.

His literary practice includes poetry, fiction, translation, screenwriting, documentary work, and editing. As a translator, Acharya has translated poetry, stories, and plays from English, Hindi, and Bangla into Nepali, and from Nepali into English. His translation work includes Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière’s The Conference of the Birds (2019) , sections of Rabindranath Tagore’s Shesher Kabita  (2011), and plays by Mohan Rakesh, J. M. Synge, and Khagendra Lamichhane. He has also translated works by Abhi Subedi, Tirtha Shrestha, and contemporary Nepali women poets. Through these translations, Acharya has helped circulate literary and theatrical works across languages, genres, and performance cultures. Acharya’s documentary and screen work extends his literary practice beyond the printed page. He has been associated with documentary projects such as StoriesPilaf and Biryani  (2026) and The Art of the Lake (2013), as  well as work on women and art in Kathmandu. His short stories have appeared in publications in Nepal, Pakistan, and Canada.

In 1999, Acharya and four other poets, including Sarubhakta, initiated the Conservation Poetry Movement   in Nepal. The movement sought to use poetry to generate public awareness about ecological and social justice. The poets travelled to villages across Nepal, writing and reading poems on climate, nature, village life, and oral traditions. Villagers and schoolchildren also participated in writing and reading. This movement places Acharya within a public and socially-engaged poetic tradition and anticipates the ecological concerns that recur throughout his later writing.

Acharya’s major poetry collections include Chhaya Kal (2006)  in Nepali, Dream Catcher (2012) in English, and Drapery of Time (2026), also in English. He also collaborated with Yukari Meldrum, Sharmila Pokharel, and artist Tiffany Addair on Somnio: The Way We See It (2015). Across these works, Acharya explores perception, memory, dream, ecological crisis, social fracture, diaspora, and the relation between personal and collective experience.

Chhayakal is one of Acharya’s major Nepali works. Its title poem, “Chhayakal” (“The Eclipsed Time”), is a long, formally experimental poem that reflects on Nepal’s social and political world from the 1990s into the early 2000s. The poem uses mythic allusion, fragmented narration, symbolic imagery, and social critique. Drawing on the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and other South Asian literary and religious traditions, Acharya reworks inherited narratives to address caste hierarchy, gendered violence, political repression, civil conflict, ecological damage, and the exhaustion of old power structures. Figures such as Shambuka, Draupadi, Prometheus, Indra, Narayana, and Prajapati become part of a poetic method that connects ancient narrative frames with contemporary crisis. Formally, Chhayakal shifts between lament, protest, meditation, scene, myth, and collective speech. Its fragmented structure mirrors the fractured society it depicts. The poem does not simply document historical suffering; it transforms that suffering through layered literary reference and symbolic recurrence. The shorter poems in the collection also explore temporality, perception, selfhood, natural cycles, and the relation between human life and elemental forces. Together, the collection presents Acharya as a poet of social witness, mythic reimagining, and philosophical inquiry.

His English collection Dream Catcher develops many of these concerns in a different linguistic and geographical context. The poems often combine natural imagery with philosophical reflection. In poems such as “Frog Dance,” “Yesterday,” “A Dreaming Dog,” “A Pond,” “A Seed,” and “Forest,” Acharya explores the interconnectedness of human, animal, vegetal, and elemental life. Ecological concern is especially important in the collection. “A Pond,” for example, moves from ecological plenitude to pollution and damage, giving poetic form to environmental decline. Dreams function throughout the book as spaces where memory, reality, imagination, and non-human consciousness overlap.

Somnio: The Way We See It extends Acharya’s interest in perception and memory into a collaborative poetic and artistic form. Created with other writers and a visual artist, the volume shows Acharya as part of a multi-artist conversation across media. His poem “Control” is especially representative of his broader poetics: it contrasts the human desire to order and dominate the world with a more open and organic relation to existence. The poem suggests that freedom comes not through mastery but through the relinquishing of mastery.

Acharya’s later English poetry collection Drapery of Time, published by Vajra Publications in 2026, marks a further development of his work in short, meditative, image-rich poems. The book engages with time, memory, migration, language, nostalgia, and cultural identity. The collection continues Acharya’s interest in bringing humans, nature, and sentient life into relation through symbolic and metaphysical reflection. It also shows a more condensed lyrical mode, where brief poems open into larger questions of perception, diaspora, belonging, and the passage of time.

With Asma Sayed, he co-edited Wanderings: An Anthology of Anglophone Nepali Diaspora Poetry, published by Mawenzi House in 2025. The anthology brings together ten poets with roots in Nepal who write from different diasporic locations and explores cultural memory, home, nostalgia, exile, identity, and reimagined belonging. As an editorial project, Wanderings strengthens Acharya’s role in shaping anglophone Nepali diasporic literature, not only as a poet but also as a curator of transnational literary voices.

Acharya’s ekphrastic poems on Canadian landscape paintings form another important part of his Canadian literary work. Some of these poems were exhibited at the Varley Art Gallery in Markham, Ontario, in 2019 and later appeared as “4 Poems on Canadian Landscape Paintings.” In poems responding to works by Arthur Lismer, Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, and Barker Fairley, Acharya reads Canadian visual landscapes through memory, migration, and comparative cultural perception. His poem on Fairley’s Prince Edward County, Clump Behind juxtaposes Canadian homesteads with memories of village houses in Nepal, showing how landscape is shaped by earlier geographies of belonging.

Acharya’s significance lies in the breadth of his literary and cultural mediation. In Nepali diasporic writing, he is important for extending poetic practice beyond memory and displacement into ecology, myth, dream, translation, and comparative poetics. In Canadian literary culture, he contributes as a bilingual and transnational writer who engages Canadian institutions, landscapes, and visual art through a Nepali and South Asian sensibility. His poetry, translations, documentary work, editing, and scholarship connect Nepal and Canada, Nepali and English, page and performance, and mythic inheritance with contemporary crisis.

References

Acharya, Pushpa Raj. Chhaya Kal. Fine Print, 2006.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj. Drapery of Time. Vajra Publications, 2026.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj. Dream Catcher. Vajra Books, 2012.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj. “4 Poems on Canadian Landscape Paintings.” Maple Tree Literary Supplement, 2021.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj. “Desires.” Stroll of Poets Anthology, Stroll of Poets Society, 2013.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj. “Dreaming Dog.” Of Nepalese Clay, 2011.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj. “Dreams of Flowers.” Beyond the Borders: A SAARC Journal, 2009.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj. “Frog Dance” and “Speak.” Of Nepalese Clay, 2010.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj. “Matribhasha.” The Polyglot Cross Walks: A Multilingual Magazine of Poetry and Art, 2017.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj. “Mother Tongue.” Anthology of Poems about Mother Tongue, 2011.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj. “Olena’s Diary” and “At the Hospice.” After the Rain: Short Stories from the SAARC Region, edited by Ayesha Zee Khan, MHA Publications, 2012.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj. “Over the Surface and Beneath.” Bengal Lights in Autumn, 2012.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj. “Superiority.” Stroll of Poets Anthology, Stroll of Poets Society, 2014.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj, Tiffany Addair, Yukari Meldrum, and Sharmila Pokharel. Somnio: The Way We See It. TiPSY Press, 2015.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj, Ajit Baral, and Suresh Ranabhat. Shaili Pustika: The Elements of Nepali Style. Sunlight Publication, 2007.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj, Arun Gupto, and Salil Subedi. The Art of the Lake. Documentary series.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj, Liza Futerman, and Thomas Lahusen. In Search of Pilaf and Biryani. Documentary film.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj, and Netra Acharya, translators. The Prophet. By Khalil Gibran, Trans-Reprint, 2004.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj, translator. “In This City.” By Abhi Subedi, Siddhartha Art Gallery, 2009.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj, translator. Parts of Shesher Kabita. By Rabindranath Tagore, Nepal-India Cultural Foundation, 2011. Staged performance.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj, translator. Song of Sorrow. By Khagendra Lamichhane, Shatkon Theatre, 2009.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj, translator. The Conference of the Birds. By Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière, directed by Deeya Maskey, Actors Studio, 2019.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj, translator. “Village,” “God,” and “Sindhupalchowk.” By Tirth Shrestha, Bouquets V: Nepal-Japan Joint Poem Collection, May 2008.

Acharya, Pushpa Raj, translator. “Poems by Four Nepali Women Poets—Manisha Gauchan, Saraswati Pratiksha, Sarita Tiwari, and Beena Thing Tamang.” La.Lit, edited by Manjushree Thapa, 2017.

Sayed, Asma. “Between Nepal and Canada: In Conversation with Pushpa Raj Acharya, Edmonton’s 2013–14 Writer-in-Exile.” Writers in Conversation, vol. 1, no. 2, Aug. 2014 https://fac.flinders.edu.au/items/ac5c324c-c73d-481c-934c-2ebd00d09e37/full.

Sayed, Asma, and Pushpa Raj Acharya, editors. Wanderings: An Anthology of Anglophone Nepali Diaspora Poetry. Mawenzi House, 2025.