Blue Metropolis: A Celebration of Indian Writing

Hosted by Paul Keen <br>Presented with Carleton University

In Person Poetry Fiction

Admission

Free

Tuesday

Oct

5:47am

Eastern

Carleton University

303 Paterson Hall • Ottawa

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Blue Metropolis: A Celebration of Indian Writing

But what is different in Kandasamy's work is the way it hovers over the sexualization of spirituality in all these stories and episodes... this voice in English is confrontational and stark, and yet somehow speaks in all the languages of India.

Champa Bilwakesh

Montreal’s Blue Metropolis Festival presents a Celebration of Indian Writing. Carleton’s Paul Keen hosts four acclaimed writers: Poet, writer, activist and translator, Meena Kandasamy; renowned poet, translator and critic K. Satchidanandan; award-winning punjabi author Ajeet Cour; and playwright, translator, and journalist Aziz Hajini.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to illness, Ajeet Cour will not be coming to Canada this Spring and will not be able to attend this event as planned.

The Authors

Ajeet Cour

Born in Lahore in 1934, Ajeet Cour is a Punjabi writer known for her socialist-realist themes including the oppression and difficult lives of poor women. She has won a number of awards for her writings including the International IATA Award, Punjabi Sahitya Sabha Award, and Shiromani Sahitkar Award. Her most famous work in English is called Pebbles in a Tin Drum.

Aziz Hajini

Aziz Hajini Azini is a Kashmiri born playwright, teacher, translator, and journalist. He has written extensively on the Kashmiri crisis and on the history of Kashmir. He has served as editor of a popular Kashmiri journal as well written books on Kashmiri script, poetry and politics. He holds a PhD in the development of Kashmiri prose in the 20th century.

K. Satchidanandan

Born in Kerala in 1946, Satchidanandan is a major poet and critic. He has also translated extensively and won many awards for his writings and translations. He has to his credit 22 collections of poetry besides many selections, 16 collections of translations of poetry and 19 collections of essays on literature, language and society – three of them in English – in addition to four plays and three travel narratives. He has 24 collections of his poetry in translation in 16 languages including Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, English, French, German and Italian. He has introduced several poets like Garcia Lorca, Alexander Block, Voznesensky, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Celan, Zbignew Herbert, Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Mahmoud Darwish and Yehuda Amichai to Malayalam readers through translations and studies besides a lot of Black, Latin American and Indian poetry. He has also travelled widely, writing and lecturing.

Meena Kandasamy

Meena Kandasamy (b.1984) is a poet, writer, activist and translator. Her work maintains a focus on caste annihilation, linguistic identity and feminism. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010). Currently, she is a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. Meena was the youngest person ever to represent India as a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program 2009. She was a featured poet at the City of Asylum Jazz Poetry Concert 2009 held in Pittsburgh, USA, the 14th Poetry Africa International Festival in October 2010 in Durban and the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival 2011. She holds a PhD in socio-linguistics, and is now working on her first novel The Gypsy Goddess.