BTS Reading Circle

Pooja Sagar works with words and the things words are asked to hold: memory, care, illness, stories, classrooms, libraries, archives, and the occasional sentence that refuses to behave.

She leads the Word Lab and Library at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru, where her work moves across writing, reading, teaching, editing, publishing, library practice, and multilingual work. Her research looks at the history of medicine and cultures of care in contemporary India, especially through the lives of practitioners, patients, and the worlds they carry with them.

Over the years, her work has moved through the theory and practice of oral history, creative writing, public history, translation, comics, games, poetry, painting, and pedagogy. She writes in English and Malayalam, paying attention to the small things: a remembered phrase, a family story, a body in discomfort, a sentence trying to become true.