Windows

Including 'Samsara in an Abandoned Landscape', winner of the Scottish Association of Writers' James Muir Poetry Prize 2026

I want to hold my memories close

and feel their weight against my ribs

A mother at her sewing machine. Tea poured into steel tumblers. Blue aerogrammes carrying love across continents. In Windows, the smallest details open onto whole lives.

Moving between India and Scotland, Anjali Ramayya writes of childhood, motherhood and the people whose presence endures in the things they leave behind. Grief sits beside humour; familiar rooms give way to mountain paths, wild gardens and the astonishment of birds.

Sensuous, tender and quietly questioning, these poems look both outwards and inwards: towards the living world and the memories we carry within us. They invite us to linger, to listen, and to recognise how much love an ordinary moment can hold.

Illustrated throughout with photographs and drawings, Windows is a debut collection to keep close and return to.

About the author

Inspired by life in India and Scotland, the two countries she calls home, Anjali Ramayya started writing poetry and short fiction after retiring from a career in psychiatry and medical software development. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Scotland, Propel and Soor Ploom, and in several anthologies.