Khairani Barokka

Khairani Barokka is a writer, artist, arts consultant, and translator from Jakarta, now UK-based. Barokka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centers disability justice as anticolonial praxis, environmental justice, and access as translation. She regularly lectures, judges, mentors, and consults for arts organizations, and has a PhD by Practice in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London. She has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, a Delfina Foundation Associate Artist, an Artforum Must-See, and the first non-British Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing. She was the first Poet-in-Residence at Modern Poetry in Translation and became the magazine’s first non-British editor. In 2023, Barokka was longlisted for the Loewe/Studio Voltaire Arts Award, and shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards in the Arts and Culture Category. Her commissions have included the ICA, Wellcome Collection, Jakarta Biennale, Southbank Centre, and Serpentine Galleries. Her most recent art exhibition was Kerokan Pol, four short films as part of a crip duo show/collaboration with Bella Milroy called “Languages of Intimacy,” curated by Grand Union and shown at Birmingham College of Art Gallery in October–November 2025. Her books include Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches, as co-editor), Rope (Nine Arches), Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches), currently longlisted for the 2025 Jhalak Prize. Her speculative nonfiction debut, Annah, Infinite (Tilted Axis Press, 2025), was an Expert Pick in The Bookseller.¹

1. Words Without Borders ↩