Arun Sood - Short Bio

Arun Sood is a Scottish-Indian writer, musician, artist, and academic. 

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Through text, music, sound, and moving-image, his works explore cultural memory, diasporic identities, song cultures, and the intersections between personal heritage, colonial histories, and climate futures.

 

His debut solo album Searching Erskine was a Guardian Folk Album of The Month, developing cult status among fans of experimental, droning, ambient folk, and released with an expansive book of artworks, poems, and essays.  He is also the author of several fiction and non-fiction titles, including the novel New Skin For The Old Ceremony: A Kirtan, which won the 2024 Kavya Prize for Fiction, while his multimedia installations and films have appeared at venues  such as The Box Gallery (Plymouth), The Millenium Film Workshop (New York), The Phoenix (Exeter), National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh), OT301 (Amsterdam), Thelma Hulbert Gallery (Honiton), and Taigh Chearsabhagh (North Uist). ​

 

Arun was born in Aberdeen to a West-Highland Mother and a Punjabi father; went to state school, dropped out, dropped in, travelled, studied English, made art, and has since lived in Glasgow, Amsterdam, DC, and now South Devon where he is Lecturer in Global Literatures at the University of Exeter. As an academic researcher, his work often straddles the line between scholarship and creative practice, with interests spanning Sound Studies, Scottish, American, and Caribbean Literatures, Musicology, Cultural Memory, and the intesections between Postcolonial and Ecocritical thought.  Musically, Arun’s compositions have been described by Elizabeth Alker (BBC3/Unclassified) as like “fragments of memories spoken and images conjured through sound and field recordings, strings and electronics and tape loops that ebb and swirl like the tide”; while his academic projects currently include the UKRI project Plants, Plantations, and the Anglophone Caribbean: Exploring Indigenous and African-descendent knowledge through text, archive, and orality and the AHRC-IAA funded project and exhibition Shifting Waterscapes: Water, Sound, Memory.

 

He is currently working on several academic and practice-based research projects, including a book-length study on the role of sound in contemporary art and writing emanating from Scottish-Caribbean island contexts, provisionally titled Sonic Islands..  ​​

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