Kiran Dass

INFO

Name	Kiran Dass (she/her)
Country of Birth	Aotearoa
Place of Residence	Ōhinehou Lyttelton
Ethnicities	Indian
Artform	Literature
Decades Active	2000s, 2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Kiran Dass is a writer, critic, arts programmer, DJ, and the Programme Director of WORD Christchurch Festival, where she has worked since 2022.

Dass grew up in Ngāruawāhia with her family home located next to the Waipā River. From a young age, she was an avid consumer of music, books and films. Her family would borrow Indian films from her uncle’s shop, a dairy in Hamilton which had a Bollywood video library. She regularly visited the Ngāruawāhia Public Library, where her love of books developed, allowing her to explore other worlds and new ideas. As a child, she enjoyed listening to the radio and later developed a love for sound and experimental music. She notes that:

...from when I was really young I was always very sure of my ears, what I was listening to, and very sure about what I was reading and absorbing. I was always a very close reader and deep listener. I had three older sisters who were all into music so I was always immersed in it. I think a lot of it is instinct, but also having the confidence and the backbone to know what you like and to be able to articulate it.

She studied at the Waikato Institute of Technology in the School of Media Arts where she majored in moving image. Upon graduating, she stayed on at WINTEC to teach moving image for three years. At this time, she also wrote a weekly film column for Nexus, the University of Waikato student magazine. This led Dass to study journalism at the Auckland University of Technology. Following this, she was one of three chief film critics for the Sunday Star-Times, was a music columnist for the NZ Listener and produced music features for RNZ’s Music 101 programme. Dass reviews books on RNZ’s Nine to Noon and was co-founder and co-producer of the books podcast Papercuts. She has contributed features, reviews and essays to outlets including The Guardian, Newsroom, NZ Herald, NZ Listener, RNZ, The Spinoff, Sunday Magazine, the Sunday Star-Times, Landfall and The Wire.

In addition to book and music reviews, her freelance journalism covers a diverse range of subjects, from music and literary features to the work of architect Roger Walker. Dass’s personal essays concentrate on the intricacies of growing up in small-town Waikato, as well as a perspective shaped by living in different places across the country, and how her enthusiastic absorption of arts and culture has moulded her.

While continuing her freelance journalism, Dass also worked as a bookseller at Unity Books for 15 years in both the Wellington and Auckland shops, and she was the buyer for Time Out Bookstore in Auckland. She describes bookselling as follows:

I think if you’ve worked as a bookseller, you can sort of do anything. You learn so much about publishing and books but also hospitality, inclusivity and people, and the thrill and nuanced art of recommending the right book for the right person never diminishes. It’s actually quite an intimate exchange.

Dass was the convening judge for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and a judge for the same prize again in 2024. She has been a judge for the PANZ Book Design Awards multiple times, as well as the Taite Music Prize. She moved to Ōtautahi in 2022 after taking up the role of Programme Director at WORD Christchurch Festival. A feature of her programming has been the inclusion of artists working in formats outside of the conventional bounds of literature, such as music, sound and performance.