Orchard Letters grows from a simple conviction: that the best writing transcends the artificial boundaries between academic rigor and artistic vitality, between the critical and the creative, between scholarship and soul.

We are a literary journal committed to work that matters—not because it follows trends or performs virtue, but because it grapples honestly with what it means to be human in all its complexity. Our pages are open to essays that question their own conclusions, to fiction that resists neat resolutions, to criticism that dares to judge, and to scholarship that remembers why anyone should care.

We particularly welcome submissions from Kashmiri writers voices too often reduced to headlines or romanticized into silence. The valley has produced poets, thinkers, and storytellers for centuries; we want the work that carries that lineage forward into uncomfortable, necessary territory.

But we are not only a regional journal. Literature knows no borders worth respecting. If your work is sharp, strange, beautiful, or true if it demands to be read we want to see it.

We publish writing that:

• Takes intellectual and artistic risks
• Challenges readers without condescending to them
• Demonstrates craft alongside courage
• Emerges from deep engagement with ideas, texts, landscapes, or lives
• Refuses to mistake sentiment for truth or provocation for insight

We do not publish work that mistakes jargon for profundity, fashionable posturing for conviction, or workshops exercises for literature.