Writing has always been part of how I understand cities. Before I draw or design, I observe and the form that observation most often takes is language: poetry, fiction, narrative. These are not separate from my design practice but continuous with it. They are ways of asking the same questions from a different angle, of reaching what research interviews and site analysis cannot always access.

The two crime fiction novels I contributed to at times as writer (as part of K.Iguana group), editor, and illustrator (The Tenth Night) for SEA Press use the city as both setting and subject. Crime is a productive lens for urban research precisely because it pushes at the edges of space, morality, identity, and urbanity. It reveals how the city actually works, who holds power within it, and what happens when those systems break down.

Like a Regular Day follows the murder of an event planner in a collaged city in hyper-flux, tracing through it the figure of the Fixer and the new fluid economies of contemporary urban work. The Tenth Night maps the networks that make a city through a kidnapping across ten nights, exploring the landscapes of work, escapism, and transgression that emerge after dark.

My debut poetry anthology, The Youth We Left Behind, published by Bookleaf Publishing in 2024 and distributed globally through Amazon, Flipkart, and Barnes and Noble, brings together poems about grief, love, cities, community, and identity, the very questions that sit at the centre of my design practice and increasingly drive commercial briefs in place branding and cultural programming.

This thread runs directly into my participatory work. In Tender Ground, poetry became a methodology: a way for migrant women to articulate experiences of belonging and displacement that conventional design research could not have reached. The published anthology is evidence that this is not a hobby alongside the practice but part of its intellectual foundation.