Pooja Mittal was born in Lagos in 1983. Having lived in Nigeria, India and New Zealand, she has been widely published and anthologized in several countries. Her first book was published when she was 13, and at the age of 17, she was the youngest Featured Poet ever in the more than fifty-year history of Poetry New Zealand. She is the author of Diaries of a Marked Man and Musings on Poetry, both of which were published when she was 21 years old. In 2001, she was selected for UNESCO’s international project, Babele Poetica, and in 2007, she was featured in both The Best Australian Poetry 2007 and The Best Australian Poems 2007. Her poetry has been translated into Russian and performed at the Moscow International Poetry Festival. She lives in Melbourne, where she is completing her Ph.D at the Centre for Postcolonial Writing in Monash University.