Abira Kannan is a Tamil-Australian writer based in Melbourne. Her work moves between memoir, cultural commentary, and feminist inquiry, with a particular attention to the quiet systems that decide who is heard and what gets kept. She holds a Diploma of Creative Writing and a Bachelor of Psychological Science (with distinction) from Deakin University.
Her essays have appeared in Entropy Magazine and FemAsia, and she has been commissioned to review for Kill Your Darlings. She writes for a community of more than five thousand readers across her social platforms, where she shares essays, cultural commentary, and veena recordings.
Alongside her writing, Abira has worked in human resources, specialising in psychological safety, diversity and inclusion, and harm prevention. This work shapes her understanding of how institutions produce silence - concerns that sit at the centre of her nonfiction.
Born in Melbourne to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, she has studied the veena since childhood and remains an active member of Australia's Carnatic music community. The instrument forms the structural and emotional spine of her debut memoir.
Abira's debut novel, Bye and I'll Write Again Tomorrow, is set to be released in 2027.
What inspired you to be a writer?
I don’t think I became a writer so much as I was finally free enough to be one. I come from storytellers – people who carried narrative in their mouths, in songs, in the way a room talked over itself – but a war and migration put my family in survival, and survival doesn’t leave room to make things. I was the one who got to live a life with space in it, and in that space I found I had been translating all along: turning what couldn’t be said into scene, into image, into something a stranger could hold.
What prompted you to write 'Bye and I'll Write Again Tomorrow'?
What prompted the book was a pattern I couldn’t stop seeing. When I laid my essays and poems side by side, the same thing was underneath all of them: silence. I came to understand it as a story of inheritance. I wanted to understand the difference between the silence that is done to you and the choice to break it – and to write it outward, so that anyone who recognised the same pattern in their own life might feel less alone in it, and see that the power was in their voice all along.
Do you have any more books in the pipeline?
This book has all my love and energy in it but I want it to be the beginning. I jot ideas down as they come and lately I am enjoying the part people don’t always count as work: actually living. That is where the next ones come from. So yes, there will be more.
What is your professional background?
For years my HR job was, in a sense, the opposite of this book - softening language until nothing in it could cut. I work in Melbourne at the intersection of psychology, data, and people: spotting patterns, asking the right questions, translating complexity into something useful. Writing is where I do the reverse - where I keep the edges in.
Any advice you’d like to give to aspiring writers?
Writing is the most therapeutic thing I know. I understood myself through the process of doing it. So my advice is: when you doubt whether you're any good, when you hit a block, when nothing comes - read more. Read everything. Don’t measure your work against anyone else's. If you're a brown writer in Australia and it feels like there aren't many of us, let that be the reason you write, not the reason you don't. Just do it.
Who/what inspires you?
Peter Drew's "Aussie" posters - faces of every background pasted up across the country - made me want to keep writing about the real stuff. Small public acts like that, that insist there's good in the world even when it feels powerless, are the company I want my writing to keep.
What are your hobbies, interests and favourite books?
Playing the veena. Watching films far too closely - I can't switch off the part of me that's reading every frame. And books, more than I could ever list; if you put one in my hands I'll probably finish it before I admit I have other things to do.
How can readers contact you?
Instagram: @abirakannan
Facebook - Abira Kannan
Website: TBC
