Sharmila Pokharel is a Nepali Canadian bilingual poet and prose writer based in Edmonton, Alberta, who writes in both Nepali and English. Her work includes poetry, short fiction, nonfiction, and life writing, and she has been an active participant in Edmonton’s literary and poetry communities since immigrating to Canada from Nepal in 2010. Her writing is marked by two major and connected strands: an early engagement with women’s lives and feminist critique in Nepal, and a later exploration of migration, bilingual consciousness, belonging, and cultural dislocation in Canada.

Pokharel was born in Kharpa village  in the eastern hills of Nepal and grew up in Rupnagar, Saptari, in the southern plains, where she received her school education. She began writing at the age of ten, when she started participating in various poetry competitions. Her literary formation was shaped by a rich mix of print and oral influences. Her father, Balaram Pokharel, a school headmaster who later became a civil servant, regularly brought home literary magazines such as Madhuparka and children’s publications such as Muna. She was also influenced by Parijat’s novels, Indira Gandhi’s autobiographical writings, and Diamond Shumsher Rana’s historical novel Seto Bagh (The White Tiger). She listened to the recitations of the Nepali Ramayana and the Mahabharata by relatives and neighbours, the ritual narratives such as Ekadashi Vratakatha (stories associated with the Ekadashi fasting). Together, these influences gave her both a literary vocabulary and an early awareness of the relationship between storytelling, memory, gender, and social life.

Her first published work, the poem “Utha Sathi” (“Get Up, My Friend”), appeared in the 1994–1995 issue of Pratibha Traimasik magazine.  During her college years in the city Biratnagar, she became a regular participant in monthly poetry readings and came into contact with established writers such as Parashu Pradhan and Dev Kumari Thapa, who encouraged her to continue writing. Other local poets, including Jyoti Jangal, Jayanta Pokahrel, and Bivash Pokharel, also offered support during this formative period.

Pokharel’s first poetry collection, Astitva  Nariko (Identity of a Woman), published in 1997, established her as a free-verse poet concerned with women’s lives, domestic labour, and gendered social inequality. The collection focuses on the experiences of women in village society, examining the burdens placed upon them within the household and the larger social order. Its title poem, “Astitva  Nariko” (“Identity of a Woman”), critiques the contradictory expectations imposed on women, who are celebrated symbolically as figures of love and sacrifice while being denied independent social identity and authority. The collection also questions the unequal valuation of sons and daughters and exposes the gap between women’s central role in sustaining family and society and their marginal place within structures of recognition and power. From the beginning, Pokharel’s poetry showed a sustained interest in the relationship between personal feeling and social injustice.

After moving to Kathmandu for engineering studies, she remained active in literary life, taking part in readings at Sahitya Sandhya, one of Nepal’s well-known monthly reading series, and associating with poets such as Anuja Ghimire. As a member of the woman’s literary organization Nari Sahitya Pratishthan, she published her second poetry collection, Amiba ra Kuntiharu ( Amoeba and Kuntis), in 2000. This volume continued her engagement with women’s experience and feminist critique, drawing on the lives of friends, relatives, and neighbours to examine the pressures and injustices faced by women in Nepali society. Among its notable poems are “Taraharu” (“The Stars”) and “Kabita Didi” (“Sister Kabita”). The former uses metaphor to suggest the overlooked worth of lives and labours that remain unrecognized within dominant social values. The latter portrays a woman whose creative life has been overtaken by domestic responsibilities, using repetition and ordinary detail to show the tension between marriage, household work, and literary self-expression.

Inspired by a real-life friend, Manju Didi, “Kabita Didi” portrays Kabita at a moment when she has stopped writing poems, unable to distinguish between water and blood. With her faith broken, she no longer turns her tears into verse. Instead, she is absorbed by domestic responsibilities and by the demands of her husband’s tastes, as the refrain repeats: “Kabita Didi is not writing poems these days.” The poem examines her apparent contentment within married life, which leads her to question whether there is any need to write about the suffering of others when she herself feels fulfilled. In doing so, it highlights the tension between Kabita’s domestic role and her creative life, reflecting on the costs and complexities of her choice. In Amiba ra Kuntiharu, Pokharel’s feminist concerns become more layered and psychologically attentive, moving beyond direct social critique toward more complex portrayals of compromise, silence, and inner conflict.

Pokharel’s literary production was interrupted when she began working as an engineer for the Madhya Marsyangdi Hydropower Project, and a long hiatus in her writing followed. This interruption became an important part of her later literary trajectory, because her return to writing would be shaped by migration and by a renewed effort to understand home, work, language, and identity. In 2010, she immigrated to Canada with her husband and settled in Edmonton. The move became a major turning point in her writing life. The immigrant experience, and especially the cultural shock of arriving in an unfamiliar landscape that did not match her expectations, prompted a new phase of reflection on the relation between old home and new home, memory and settlement, and the emotional and social complexities of living between places. Writing became both a response to displacement and a means of reconnecting herself to literary community after a long silence.

In Edmonton, Pokharel found mentorship in literary circles that supported her transition into English-language writing, including the poet Alice Major and the Borderlines Writers Circle. This transition led to the publication of her bilingual poetry collection Paradeshmsa Mero Desh:My Country in a Foreign Land  in 2014. The collection explores migration, memory, and the persistence of homeland within diasporic life. Its title poem “My Country in aForeign Land,” reflects on the ways in which the homeland remains present even after migration. The poem insists that one does not simply leave a country behind; rather, the country continues to inhabit language, memory, ritual, and the body. Symbols such as red tika—the ritual mark placed on the forehead—and pote—the beaded necklace associated especially with married Hindu Nepali women—function as cultural markers of continuity, while references to the Gayatri Mantra and a Hindu devotional world reinforce the sense that migration does not sever identity so much as relocate it. The poem is therefore central to understanding Pokharel’s diasporic poetics: it presents immigrant identity not as replacement, but as coexistence.

Her prose writing in Canada extends these concerns into nonfiction. In “My First Pair of Shoes in Canada” (2021), Pokharel reflects on immigration, adaptation, labour, and belonging through the symbolic frame of an ordinary object. The essay recounts the disorientation of arrival in Edmonton, the support of relatives and friends, the experience of early immigrant work, and the effort to rebuild a professional life after migration. Already trained as an engineer in Nepal, she pursued further study at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, completed a two-year diploma, and eventually secured work in an engineering company. The piece links the material realities of settlement—employment, housing, retraining, and everyday adjustment—to the emotional dimensions of immigrant self-making.

Pokharel’s engagement with migration and cross-cultural life also appears in Somnio: The Way We See It (2015), a collaborative poetry and art collection that includes works by Tiffany Addair, Yukari Meldrom, Pushpa Raj Acharya, and Pokharel herself. In the poem “An Immigrant Mind,” Pokharel explores the split consciousness of the immigrant subject, moving between attachment to a homeland beyond the visible horizon and a growing emotional investment in Canada. Seasonal imagery, especially the contrast between the long winter and the brief summer, becomes a means of expressing dual belonging. The poem suggests that immigrant identity is not a matter of choosing one country over another, but of learning to inhabit two emotional geographies at once.

Education has continued to shape Pokharel’s development as a writer. In addition to her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, she holds a master’s degree in sociology from Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu. Her sociological training is important to her literary work, particularly in its attention to gender, social structure, human behaviour, and the everyday workings of inequality. In Canada, she expanded her creative practice through formal writing study, completing a graduate certificate in creative writing at Humber College in 2021 and the Writer’s Studio creative writing certificate at Simon Fraser University in 2023. These programs helped her extend her work beyond poetry into fiction and creative nonfiction.

Pokharel’s work has appeared in a range of literary magazines, journals, and anthologies. Her nonfiction piece “Fear of English,” published in New Forum in 2021, examines the anxieties and vulnerabilities involved in learning and living within a new language as an immigrant. Her short story “The Girls” appeared in The Humber Literary Review the same year. Her work “A Letter to My School Teacher” received recognition in the 2020 Pandemic Postcards Contest organized by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. Her poetry has also appeared in the Stroll of Poets 30th Anniversary Chapbook, several Stroll of Poets anthologies, the 2021 Parkland Poets’ Anthology, Winter Water, and other venues such as ART Trends, The Polyglot Lunch Box, Asian Signature, Poetry x Hunger, and WordCity Monthly. This publication record reflects both her continued presence in Nepali and English literary spaces and her growing place within western Canadian literary networks.

Throughout her career, Pokharel has received awards and recognition for both her literary work and her broader cultural contribution. In Nepal, she won prizes in poetry competitions between 1990 and 2000 and received the ENSAS Engineering Writer Award in 2007, an acknowledgement of her unusual combination of technical and literary accomplishment. In Canada, she received the Cultural Diversity in the Arts Award from the Edmonton Arts Council in 2012, recognizing her role in promoting cultural diversity through writing. In 2014, she was also associated with the Edmonton Arts Council’s Cultural Diversity in the Arts Award Project Grant for the group project Somnio: The Way We See It, a recognition that underscores her collaborative as well as individual literary work.

Sharmila Pokharel’s significance lies in the way her writing connects feminist poetry in Nepal with bilingual diasporic writing in Canada. Her work is distinguished by its sustained attention to women’s lives, domestic labour, migration, language, and the emotional complexity of belonging across borders. Writing in both Nepali and English, she occupies an important place in Nepali Canadian literature and in Edmonton’s literary community, where she has helped expand the visibility of immigrant and multilingual experience. Her poetry and prose demonstrate how personal narrative can illuminate larger structures of gender, migration, and cultural transition. For this reason, Pokharel is best understood as a significant bilingual Nepali Canadian writer whose work bridges Nepalese feminist literary traditions and contemporary Canadian diasporic writing.

References

Pokahrel, Sharmila. “All She Has Is Time.” 2020 Stroll of Poets Anthology, 2020.

Pokahrel, Sharmila. Amoeba ra Kuntiharu. Madhav Dhakal and Kunti Dhakal, 2000.

Pokahrel, Sharmila. Astitva  Nariko. 1997.

Pokahrel, Sharmila. “Dream.” 2019 Stroll of Poets Anthology, 2019.

Pokahrel, Sharmila. “The Familiar Faces from My Commute.” Stroll of Poets 30th Anniversary Chapbook, 2022.

Pokahrel, Sharmila. “Fear of English.” New Forum, no. 3, 2021.

Pokahrel, Sharmila. “The Girls.” The Humber Literary Review,   2021, https://humberliteraryreview.com/spotlight/spotlight2-wa2wx-7h7z5-6p8fw-rxehg-np8tm-5nc5d-5tpy4-5f2mg-ma24g-f8ymm-324sx.

Pokahrel, Sharmila. “An Illusion.” Winter Water Chapbook, 2019.

Pokahrel, Sharmila. “An Immigrant Mind.” 2015 Stroll of Poets Anthology, 2015.

Pokahrel, Sharmila. “A Letter to My School Teacher.” Pandemic Postcard Chap Book. Writers’ Guild of Alberta, 2020, https://writersguild.ca/pandemic-postcards-chapbook/.

Pokahrel, Sharmila. Paradeshma Mero Desh: My Country in a Foreign Land.  Co-translated by Alice Major, Nepali Literary Club of Alberta, 2014.

Pokahrel, Sharmila. “My First Pair of Shoes in Canada.” The Shoe Project Stories, 2021, https://theshoeprojectstories.com.

Pokahrel, Sharmila. “Small Things Matter.” 2022 Stroll of Poets Anthology, 2022.

Pokahrel, Sharmila. “The Stranger in Town.” A Blindman Brewing Session Story, 23 Nov. 2020, https://ckua.com/listen/the-stranger-in-town-by-sharmila-pokharel-a-blindman-brewing-session-story/.

Pokahrel, Sharmila, et al. Somnio: The Way We See It. TiPSY Press, 2015.