While studying for her MA in Creative Writing at the
University of East Anglia, Arshi won the inaugural Magma poetry competition for her poem "Hummingbird" and was a winner in the Troubadour International Competition (2013) for her poem "Bad Day in the Office". In 2014, she was joint winner in the
Manchester Poetry Prize competition with a portfolio of five poems. In 2015, she published her debut collection of poems
Small Hands with Pavilion Poetry, a new poetry imprint from
Liverpool University Press under the editorship of poet and critic
Deryn Rees-Jones. The collection includes an elegy sequence for Arshi's brother, Deepak, who died suddenly in 2012, as well as poems inspired by her small children and poems about her own childhood on Hounslow. Poems from the collection were published in
The Guardian and
The Sunday Times. Her poem "This Morning" appeared on posters across the
London Underground, as part of the
British Council's "
Indian Poems on the Underground" project in 2017. Arshi went on to judge the
Forward Prize for Poetry in 2017 and hosted the Awards with
Andrew Marr at the
Royal Festival Hall. Arshi has also judged the Magma Poetry Competition and the Outspoken Poetry Prize. She also judged the
Manchester Poetry Prize in 2017. In April 2017,
BBC Radio 4 broadcast Arshi's commissioned poem "Odysseus, The Patron Saint of Foreigners?" In 2018, she was asked to read at the First Stuart Hall Public Conversation. Arshi's second collection,
Dear Big Gods, was published in April 2019, also by Pavilion Poetry. This collection continues to address her brother's death and to experiment with form, with prose poems, a
sestina and a
tanka, and includes poetic responses to
Lorca,
Emily Dickinson,
The Odyssey and
The Mahabharata. The title poem and an essay, "On Gods, Human Rights and the Poet", were published in the US magazine
POETRY in 2019. In the essay, Arshi comments: "A poem is not a human rights instrument or the pleadings in a court case, nor should it seek to be but one activity that the human rights lawyer and poet share is the restless interrogation of language....Poetry needs to continue to strive to make space for itself and think the unthinkable, the unimaginable on the page." In 2021, Arshi's debut novel,
Somebody Loves You, was published by
And Other Stories. Set in suburban London, it tells of a British Indian family whose younger daughter, Ruby, develops
selective mutism. In 2022, it was shortlisted for the
Jhalak Prize and the
Goldsmiths Prize and longlisted for the
Desmond Elliott Prize and the
Republic of Consciousness Prize. The novel was named book of the week in
The Telegraph and
This Week magazine. Arshi was a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at
Trinity College, Cambridge from 2022 to 2024. She was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature in 2022. == Works ==