As we close the year, The Wise Owl turns its gaze toward creative brilliance—of language, of imagination, of inquiry, and of artistic courage. Our December issue celebrates creators who illuminate the world in ways both intimate and expansive.

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We are honoured to spotlight Vona Groarke, one of Ireland’s most acclaimed poets, whose work is marked by luminous precision and an acute awareness of the spaces a poem makes for itself. Her book Infinity Pool (Gallery Press, 2025), her ninth poetry collection and fifteenth book, shortlisted for the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize, continues her unparalleled exploration of form, thought, and lyric clarity.

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This month, we also speak with visionary curator Alessandro Schiavetti—President and Curator of the ACS Art Center, Artistic Director of the #Raccontandoci Festival, and Director of the Municipal Exhibition Center of Cecina (CEC). Schiavetti brings to contemporary art a rare blend of scholarship, imagination, and cultural empathy, reshaping creative spaces into sites of dialogue and discovery.

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Our Talking Books segment features an engrossing conversation with Nishi Chawla about her forthcoming novel Silent Walls, Speaking Stones (Pierian Springs Press, Fall 2025). Set in Ayodhya, the book examines the intertwining of faith, identity, memory, and grief through the prism of a divided family in a divided land—an intimate story that echoes larger national and emotional fault lines.

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Our Reviews section brings thoughtful readings of two striking books: Spinning Pinwheels by K. Ramesh, reviewed with sensitivity by Lakshmi Iyer and The Dead Fish by Rajkumar Chaudhary, translated by Mahua Sen and perceptively reviewed by Lakshmi Kannan. In our Film segment, we confront the unsettling and necessary questions posed by Humans in the Loop, a documentary that examines how AI is slipping into the seams of everyday life; disrupting, redefining, and at times displacing the human centre of our stories.

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The Poetry and Fiction sections are, as always, alive with voices from around the world—poems and stories that remind us of the many ways the heart learns to speak.

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In Visual Arts, our journey takes us to the National Gallery of Modern Art in London, where the glowing canvases of Vincent van Gogh mesmerise the eye with their radiance. To stand before his work is to encounter resilience in its purest form: colours bright as breath, brushstrokes sure despite the storms that raged within him. His canvases, defiant in their joy, remain a lesson in how art outshines suffering. We also have a segment on The Day of The Dead, where Mexicans serenade their dead instead of mourning them.

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This month’s Wise Owl Picks feature two compelling reads to close the year with: Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian & a Thief, recently showcased by Oprah Winfrey, and Sanjoy Roy’s engaging memoir There is a Ghost in my Room, books that linger long after the final page has been turned.

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As the year winds down, we invite you to savour this issue, a celebration of literature and art in all genres and forms. May it inspire reflection, spark conversation, and offer you moments of stillness and wonder.

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The Wise Owl Team