Arun Sood - Short Bio
Arun Sood is a Scottish-Indian writer, musician, academic, and intermedia artist working across multiple forms. Through working creatively and critically with archives, his work explores cultural memory, diasporic identities, song cultures, and the intersections between personal heritage, colonial histories, and climate futures.
Arun was born in Aberdeen to a West-Highland Mother and a Punjabi father, and has since lived in Glasgow, Amsterdam, DC, and now South Devon where he is Lecturer in Global Literatures at the University of Exeter. His varied critical and creative practice encompasses academic publications, fiction, video installlations, and critically acclaimed albums made up of field-recordings, guitars, accordion, piano, spoken word and programmed synths.
His books include Robert Burns and the United States of America: Poetry, Print, and Memory, c. 1786-1886 (a critical study of the Scottish Romantic poet and song-collector Robert Burns in Global contexts); New Skin For The Old Ceremony: A Kirtan (a road novel exploring notions of home, heritage, and belonging among the South Asian diaspora); and Searching Erskine (a non-fiction artbook exploring the intersections between art, ecology, and place in relation to the island of Vallay in the Outer Hebrides, released with a corresponding album).
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 Jude Rogers (of The Guardian) describes how “the spirit of sonic collage holds echoes of other Scottish works such as King Creosote and Jon Hopkins’ Mercury-nominated Diamond Mine, but Sood’s accordions, cellos and pianos also meet more abrasive textures.”
Most recently, Arun become interested in the connections between folk culture, collecting, place, and climate futures. As an essayist, Arun's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.
He is currently working on several academic and practice-based research projects and welcomes further enquiries.