Location: 72, Lodi Estate
City: New Delhi
Date: Mon, 2012/12/10 – 6:30pm
Price: Free Entry.
Karthika Nair in conversation with Karthika V.K.
Thursday, 10th December 2012, 6.30pm
M. L. Bhartia Auditorium, Alliance française de Delhi
Writers, Etc is our literary platform: a space where the written word gets primacy, where written ideas and their practitioners can interact with each other and the general public, coming together to ask pertinent questions and seek their answers: what role does literature play in contemporary societies? How do writers see their responsibilities vis-à-vis the public and, turning that over, how do we see writers? How has the written word adapted to its place among the growing pantheon of varied and addictive forms of cultural transmission? The aim is to encourage a discovery, unencumbered by genre, of all the written oeuvres, ranging from living legends to new and emerging talent.
Four our eighteenth session we invite the dynamic Karthika Nair, in conversation with Karthika V.K.
Karthika Nair is the author of a poetry collection, Bearings (HarperCollins India, 2009). She was born in India, lives in Paris, and works as a producer in performing arts. This proximity to performing arts, and to dance, in particular, is refracted in much of her poetry, which has been published in several anthologies and journals including Indian Literature, Caravan India, The Asia Mag, Live Mint, Terre à Ciel, Penguin’s 60 Indian Poets and Blood axe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, The Literary Review and The Poetry Review. Her poems have been translated into French and Italian.
Nair co-scripted British-Bangladeshi choreographer Akram Khan’s Laurence Olivier-award-winning dance production Desh (2011), working alongside Khan, visual artist Tim Yip, composer Jocelyn Pook and performance poet Polar Bear. Desh, which weaves quasi-biographical stories within the wider history of a newly-independent Bangladesh, received a rousing, emotional response from the Bangladeshi Diaspora in the UK, and has been hailed as a “masterpiece” (Luc Jennings, Observer) and “technically ingenious, theatrically unsettling and emotionally unbearable.” (Sarah Frater, the Evening Standard).
Young Zubaan (India) and Editions Hélium (France) will soon be bringing out The Boy, the Bees and Bonbibi, one of the stories she wrote for Desh, as a children’s book illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet. She is currently working on her next collection for HarperCollins, an account of the Mahabharata war in 18 voices.