The first writer to have the timing of her residency affected by the pandemic; Kiran reviews books regularly on RNZ and her writing has appeared in NZ Herald, NZ Listener, RNZ, The Spinoff, Pantograph Punch, Sunday magazine, Sunday Star-Times, Landfall and The Wire (UK). She has chaired sessions at the Auckland Writers Festival, Verb Wellington, New Zealand Festival of the Arts, and WORD Christchurch. Kiran has been a judge at the PANZ Book Design Awards for the past three years and was the convening judge for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards – Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. Kiran contributed a chapter to the book Erewhon Calling: Experimental Sound in New Zealand and she co-hosts the books podcast Papercuts.
During her residency Kiran will work on a series of essays where memoir and cultural criticism intersect with threads of biography and social history. There will be a focus on music, culture, race and what it was like as an outsider growing up in the small New Zealand town Ngaruawahia, her early discovery of music and how that has empowered her.