The Institute proudly presents the sequel to our hugely popular poetry collection, Our Time Is A Garden, from 2023. The new book, titled Our Time Is A Garden: New Nature Writing by Writers of Colour, Volume 2, and again edited by IASH alumna Dr Alycia Pirmohamed, is available as a free Open Access eBook. Contributors include Pratyusha, Anita Mackenzie, Karishma Sangtani, Sunnah Khan, Reyahn King, Beth Tianxin Xia, Nadia Maloney, Anjali Ramayya, Shambhawi Tripathi, Titilayo Farukuoye, Nasim Rebecca Asl, Zain Rishi, Lakshmi Ajay, Etzali Hernández, Aileen Angsutorn Lees, Alycia Pirmohamed, Lesa Ng, Shasta Hanif Ali, Niall Moorjani, Jeda Pearl, Nichelle Santagata and Nina Mingya Powles. The cover artwork is by local artist Anupa Gardner.
Our Time Is A Garden is part of a larger project that began as Dr Pirmohamed’s research on radical landscape poetry as the Junior Anniversary Fellow at IASH. The first iteration of the project took place in 2022 and invited participants in Scotland to join five workshops over six months that were co-facilitated by artists and academics working in various areas of ecological writing. In 2025, Dr Pirmohamed collaborated with the Scottish BPOC Writers Network and the field notes collective (Jessica J Lee, Pratyusha, Alycia Pirmohamed, and Nina Mingya Powles) to run the programme a second time, this time taking place as a two-day short course over a single weekend.
All the writers included in this book attended the workshop series as either attendees or guest speakers. The programme was open to poets at all stages in their careers and from any educational background. It aimed to develop writing skills and promote knowledge exchange by sharing interdisciplinary art and research.
As a research project, Our Time Is A Garden aims to explore how online workshops and community programming for writers of colour promote accessible learning, activism, and a sense of belonging or identity formation for participants. This programme also aimed to decolonise the literary arts in Scotland, primarily by supporting the development of, and creating space for, new nature writing by writers of colour, and by examining how writers from the Global Majority map multiplicity in terms of language, culture, nation, and other intersecting aspects of identity.
Our Time Is A Garden: New Nature Writing by Writers of Colour, Volume 2 is available as a free eBook here (opens as PDF, 44 pages). While the book is free, the editorial team would like to suggest that readers make a donation to the Sameer Project, a rapid-response mutual aid initiative that supports the most vulnerable communities in Gaza.
We would like to thank the Scottish BPOC Writers Network, the field notes collective, Sun Yung Shin, Anupa Gardner, designer Bill Walsh and the many contributors to the volume.
Image: Keeper of plants © Anupa Gardner. All rights reserved.