Ananta Press is delighted to announce the official nomination of Kriti’s poetry collection, The One Who Stayed, for the Ananta Press Sahitya Ratna Award 2026.
The One Who Stayed is a deeply personal collection of poems that moves through rage, fear, love, attachment, loss, loneliness, healing, and the difficult journey of finding one’s way back to oneself. The collection is thoughtfully divided into four emotional sections: The Fire Within, Where the Heart Gets Lost, The People Who Leave, and Finding My Way Home.
What makes this collection especially meaningful is its emotional honesty. Kriti does not present pain as something that disappears overnight. Instead, her poems explore what it feels like to hold on too tightly, to miss someone while resisting the urge to reach out, to live through sleepless nights, and to question whether the people around us truly understand what we are carrying inside.
The collection gradually moves toward an important realization: healing does not always come from someone returning. Sometimes, it begins when we return to ourselves. In the title poem, The One Who Stayed, the speaker realizes that the person she had been waiting for was not someone else, but the part of herself that had never truly left.
It is this combination of vulnerability, emotional relatability, self-reflection, and hope that makes The One Who Stayed worthy of recognition. The poems speak to readers who have experienced love, separation, anxiety, loneliness, emotional exhaustion, or the quiet process of rebuilding themselves.
The book is now being considered as part of the Ananta Press Sahitya Ratna Award 2026 evaluation process, celebrating literary voices that create meaningful connections with readers through originality, expression, and emotional impact.
Heartiest congratulations to Kriti on this special nomination. We wish her the very best for the upcoming evaluation and look forward to seeing her poetic voice reach many more readers.
Congratulations from Ananta Press Publishing and Crafted by Vikrant.
