Saraswoti Lamichhane is a Nepal-born poet, editor, translator, and literary organizer based in St. Albert, Alberta. Her work brings together landscape, migration, memory, gendered experience, and diasporic belonging. Active in literary communities in both Nepal and Canada, she has published poems in journals and anthologies across North America, Europe, and South Asia, contributed to editorial projects in Nepali writing in English, and emerged as an important voice in Nepali diasporic poetry. Her new poetry collection, Karaikhola Flows, was published by Mawenzi House in 2026.

Lamichhane’s work draws strongly on the natural world and on the layered relation between everyday life and remembered landscape. She became interested in writing at an early age. Her first love of literature came through Japanese children’s stories. She completed a bachelor’s degree in English from Tribhuvan University in 2006 and a master’s degree in English from Pokhara University in 2008. She worked as a lecturer at Everest College, Tribhuvan University, in Kathmandu from 2009 to 2011. In 2023, she completed a creative writing certificate at the University of Toronto.

Lamichhane’s literary involvement extends back at least to 2006, when she a member of the editorial board of Of Nepalese Clay, a literary magazine published by the Society of Nepali Writers in English in Nepal (NWEN). In 2011, she was one of the contributors to Six Strings: A Joint Anthology of Poems, published in Kathmandu by NWEN. Her later work has appeared in a wide range of anthologies and journals, especially from 2019 onward. She is also one of the editors of Kavya: Representative Nepali Poetry in English, published by Grey Sparrow Press in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 2022. The anthology gathers Nepali poetry in English from the 1950s to the present and includes thirty-seven poets, thereby helping frame a literary history of Nepali poetry in English from earlier formal modes to newer contemporary and diasporic voices.

Lamichhane’s poems have appeared in literary magazines and journals in several countries across Europe and North America. She has contributed to Outlying Voices and World City Lit in Canada and Rucksack in Italy and other platforms such as CKUA Radio in Alberta, Canada, the World Poetry Cafe Radio Program, and the Persian Radio Program in Ottawa. Her works have been published in various journals and magazine,s including Namaashoum and World City Monthly in Canada, The Feelings Journals, Tiny Seed Journal, Swimming with Elephants, Rigorous, and Formidable Women’s Sanctuary in the US, Underwood Press in the UK, Poet’s Choice in India, Tint Journal in Austria, and Gyroscope Review in Poland.

Lamichhane repeatedly emphasizes the intersection of local and global perspectives in her poetry. She draws from life in both Nepal and Canada, bringing together remembered sounds, landscapes, family traditions, and the altered sensory world of migration. For her, writing becomes a way of connecting places and cultures, allowing unfamiliar geographies to speak to one another. As a woman writer, she also registers the difficulty of balancing literary work with traditional gender roles and the struggle for recognition within a literary field still marked by unequal expectations. This dimension of her writing is not incidental. It shapes the ways memory, home, care, and mobility enter her poems.

For example, her poem, “Festival of Dashain” (2021),  explores the observance of the Nepali festival Dashain in Canada while recalling its fuller public and familial forms in Nepal. The poem presents Dashain as a continuity across distance, linking past and present, homeland and adopted country, tradition and altered circumstance. Cultural transmission is central: the speaker shares Dashain stories with her daughters and seeks to preserve ritual memory in diaspora. Nostalgia in the poem is not passive recollection but an active form of inheritance. The quoted lines evoke the crowded return to rural homes in Nepal through sound, smell, movement, food, and kinship:

the music of Mangaldhoon

on radios, TVs, ads, and greetings. a river of homebound traffic,

buses loaded with extra passengers

baggage full of gifts, sweet smell of new clothes

aroma of Sell Roti, grandkids running to gramma’s arms

in Nepal, Dashain is cities walking to rural homes.

Against this remembered abundance, the line “In Canada, it comes as the cuddles of memories tied to the rim of usual routine” poignantly captures what festival becomes in exile: diminished in public scale, but not emptied of feeling.

Another poem, “good-bye home town,” turns to departure from childhood space and the emotional complexity of leaving. The speaker flies away from the familiar valley of paddy, maize, and millet, experiencing distance as both loss and possibility. The fading hills suggest the gradual recession of memory as well as the movement from a known centre toward an uncertain horizon. Yet the poem does not remain in grief. It also imagines a wider world and a more expansive belonging, “here, there, and everywhere.” Its short lines and broken syntax reinforce motion, separation, and transition. The poem’s emotional force lies in its refusal to separate attachment from liberation; it holds both together.

“October Walks ” (2021) shifts to an autumn landscape, using a falling leaf as a figure for time, mortality, and transformation. A gust of wind tears the leaf from its branch, and its descent becomes almost theatrical: leaves stumble, screech, and crawl in the “theatre of time.” The speaker then addresses the leaf directly, imagining it landing “weightlessly” in her arms. The leaf’s darkening edges mark death as a process rather than a sudden end. Yet the poem discovers tenderness within decline, comparing the fallen leaf to a newborn seeking warmth and care. Its final movement recasts death not as annihilation but as passage:

to you little leaf

death, but a flight

landing weightlessly

from the twigs to my arms.

In this poem, Lamichhane’s thematic field widens beyond diaspora and memory to encompass the natural cycles of existence and the intimate emotional meanings found within them.

The poem “Fort McMurray” (2019)   brings her attention to Canadian landscape into more explicitly political and ecological territory. It reflects on the environmental devastation associated with industrial extraction in the Athabasca oil sands region. The speaker recognizes the beauty of the land while lamenting its exploitation and injury. The imagery is fierce and accusatory: the land appears violated, scarred, and plundered; resources are extracted mercilessly; profit mutilates the natural world. The poem ends in sorrow rather than resolution, mourning the triumph of greed over ecological integrity. Its significance within Lamichhane’s work lies in showing her as a poet of not only homeland memory, but also of Canadian land, industry, and environmental violence, written through migrant attention.

“Visiting Back Home”  (2019) returns more directly to diaspora and divided belonging. The speaker has been away from home for thirteen years and has returned three times, each visit releasing what the poem calls defrosted memories. The recollection of a younger self—fearless, wild, and uncontained—contrasts with the present reality of domestic duties and adult responsibilities. The poem moves between two homes, two family networks, two cultural worlds, and two modes of selfhood. Its central image is that of the butterfly:

If my roots grow deeper

In either land,

My butterflies will lose their wings

And leave me a caterpillar.

The image resists any simple narrative of assimilation or return. Belonging here is mobile, fragile, and plural. The poem articulates the difficulty of rooting oneself fully in one place without diminishing another part of the self.

Taken together, these poems show that Lamichhane’s recurring concerns include nature, migration, festival memory, ecological attention, women’s lived experience, divided belonging, generational transmission, and the emotional work of carrying homeland into another landscape. Her poetry often moves between Nepal and Canada, between domestic intimacy and public history, between the sensory richness of memory and the altered routines of immigrant life. Landscape is never merely scenic in these poems. It is ethical, cultural, and relational: valley, leaf, oil sands, hometown, and festival all become sites through which questions of identity, loss, continuity, and adaptation are worked out.

Her collection Karaikhola Flows brings together themes that have long shaped Lamichhane’s poetry: childhood memory, Himalayan village life, women’s everyday struggles, education, migration, rural hardship, and the pull of land, river, and forest. The collection also engages with difficult histories, including Maoist-era violence, child marriage, trafficking, displacement, and the pressures placed on women and rural communities. At the same time, it foregrounds resilience and belonging, showing how people carry place, memory, and family histories across different geographies.

Peter Midgley’s review of Saraswoti Lamichhane’s Karaikhola Flows, published in Issue 25 of Edmonton Poetry Festival’s newsletter The Magpie in July 2026, emphasizes the collection’s movement between childhood innocence, danger, memory, and displacement. Midgley reads Lamichhane’s poems as deeply rooted in nature, Nepali mythology, and the landscapes of home, while also showing how those roots are unsettled by war and migration. He notes the recurring presence of Kali, the Goddess of Death, and suggests that Lamichhane’s poems remember what violence and exile might otherwise erase.

The review also highlights the collection’s concern with diaspora, women’s education, writing, fatherhood, silence, and the search for belonging. Midgley describes the immigrant experience through the image of seasonal rivers, writing, “In these places away from home, we become ephemeral rivers.” He also emphasizes Lamichhane’s connection to the natural world, especially through the idea that the “soul needs a forest.” Overall, Midgley presents Karaikhola Flows as a collection about survival, re-rooting, and the power of poetry to recover the “bones of the past.”

In the preface to the book, Lamichhane presents Karaikhola as more than a place and as a living presence shaped by memory, family, labor, and ecological renewal. She describes her father’s afforestation efforts, which turned a dry seasonal river into one that “started to flow year-round” (ix). This image anchors the collection, with Karaikhola as an enduring presence the speaker carries through time, distance, and migration.

The poems explore the interconnectedness of body, land, and memory. In the opening poem, “Birth Story,” the speaker’s emergence is tied to rain, soil, river, and agricultural labor. Her birth is “a song to the earth,” and the news reaching the rice terrace “becomes energy” (1). Rather than treating birth as a private event, the poem situates the female body within a wider ecological and communal context. In “Given to the Wilderness,” the forest becomes a place of intimacy, freedom, and learning. She writes: “Every pine I hug is a mother” and extends care and belonging beyond the human family to the land itself, and the speaker becomes “a disciple / of little things,” learning from trees, wind, solitude, and wilderness (2). Karaikhola Flows does not offer a nostalgic return to childhood innocence. The poems also address violence that disrupts both home and landscape. In “Given to the Wilderness,” political conflict alters the speaker’s environment: “Then the Maoists came, / and I shut my door to the darkness” (2). What was once open and protective becomes associated with fear and memory. Although the collection moves from Karaikhola to Alberta, its central motif endures: the river and nature as origin, witness, wound, source of survival, healing, and care.

Lamichhane has also received literary support through grants and mentorship. The entry notes the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Mentorship Program in 2022, and public author materials additionally mention support from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Her commitment to literary community is evident in sustained organizational participation. From 2018 to 2020, she served on the board of the Parkland Poets Society. She has participated in the Stroll of Poets Society and is a member of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, the Stroll of Poets, Parkland Poets, the Mahakavi Laxmi Prasad Devkota Study and Research Center, the Canadian Authors Association, and the League of Canadian Poets. Earlier, from 2008 to 2010, she served as a board member of the Society of Nepali Writers in English.

Lamichhane’s significance lies in the way she brings Nepali diasporic memory, women’s experience, ritual continuity, and ecological consciousness into Canadian literary space. Her poems connect Alberta and Canada to Himalayan memory-worlds without collapsing one into the other. They make room for festivals carried across continents, for migrant daughters raising children in another language-world, for leaves, rivers, and industrial landscapes to become part of a transnational poetics of belonging. As editor and anthology-maker, she has also helped shape the field of Nepali poetry in English and broaden its visibility. As an active participant in Canadian literary organizations, she contributes to a literary culture that is more multilingual, more regionally and globally connected, and more attentive to immigrant and diasporic experience. In this sense, her work enriches Canadian society and literature by expanding what Canadian poetry can remember, whom it can address, and what cultural inheritances it can hold.

References

Aryal, Khem, Tika Lamsal, Saraswoti Lamichhane,   et al., editors. Kavya: Representative Nepali Poetry in English. Grey Sparrow Press, 2022.

Lamichhane, Saraswoti. “Festival of Dashain.” WordCity Literary Journal, 7 Nov. 2021, https://wordcitylit.ca/2021/11/07/festival-of-dashain-a-poem-by-saraswoti-lamichhane/.

Lamichhane, SaraSwoti. “Fort McMurray.” Tint Journal, Fall 2019, https://tintjournal.com/poetry/fort-mcmurray.

Lamichhane, Saraswoti. “good-bye home town” and “October walks.” WordCity Literary Journal, 6 Nov. 2021, https://wordcitylit.ca/2021/11/06/poetry-by-saraswoti-lamichhane/.

Lamichhane, Saraswoti. Karaikhola Flows. Mawenzi House, 2026.

Lamichhane, Saraswoti. “Visiting Back Home.” Swimming with Elephants Publications, 1 Dec. 2019, https://swimmingwithelephants.com/2019/12/01/weekly-write-visiting-back-home-by-saraswoti-sara-lamichhane/.

Lamichhane, Saraswati, et al. Six Strings: A Joint Anthology of Poems. NWEN, 2011.

Midgley, Peter. “Finding Ourselves in the Story of Another: Universal Truths in Karaikhola Flows.” The Magpie, issue 25, Edmonton Poetry Festival, July 2026. Reposted on Saraswoti Lamichhane.

“SaraSwoti Lamichhane.” Tint Journal, Fall 2019, https://tintjournal.com/about/writers/saraswoti-lamichhane.