Anand Bharat

Anand Bharat is the pen name of a British writer from Yorkshire. He writes stories and short essays about awareness and the nature of experience, knowing that what they point to cannot really be conveyed in words. Even so, like many before him, he feels compelled to try. His first book, The Walk, follows a young monk and an old man through London over a day and a night.

He doesn’t teach, belong to a lineage or run retreats, and he has never meditated or done yoga. His interests are ordinary ones: music, his family, and finding new food and new places to eat.

What he writes about is the plain fact of being aware, something everyone already knows and almost nobody stops to notice. Plenty of others have written about it before him, and he writes about it in his own way, through ordinary things: a queue at the shops, a cup of tea, a walk across town.

Nothing in his writing asks to be believed, and none of it claims anything special. What the words point to is the most ordinary thing there is, as ordinary as a kettle coming to the boil and just as close.