Nobel Prize in Literature 2024: Is the Jury Set to Move Away From Choosing Yet Another Eurocentric, Male Writer?
Since its creation, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been a Eurocentric, male affair. Of 120 laureates, only 17 have been women, with eight of them in the past 20 years. | Photo Credit: JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP The Nobel Prize in Literature has honoured predominantly Western writers since it was first
Nobel Prize in Literature 2024: Han Kang Becomes First South Korean Author to Win Coveted Honour
The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to South Korean author Han Kang (53) on October 10, for what the Nobel committee called “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee, announced the
“Bhakti Is A Matter of Fire and Blood’: Jerry Pinto on Translating Bhakti Poetry, Its Challenges, Rewards, and Cultural Bridges
It is hard to find a form of writing that Jerry Pinto does not revel in. He started as a poet. His 2006 biography of the Bollywood dancing star Helen (Helen: The Life and Times of A Bollywood H-Bomb) changed that. These light-hearted literary avatars were pushed aside by the tender
Ahead of Her Times: Freedom and Feminism As Seen Through Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s Eyes
Autumn 1947, New Delhi. British rule in India had ended. Cyril Radcliffe had drawn a line dividing the subcontinent into two. In the violent Partition riots that ensued, half a million people died and 10 million fled. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay arrived at the newly created Relief and Rehabilitation Secretariat in New
Nobel Laureate Han Kang Declines Celebration Amid Wars in Ukraine and Gaza
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for her craft, the South Korean writer Han Kang was immediately faced with her sense of political responsibility. A writer is not an isolated being lost in the island of literature. She is a political being who lives in the midst of the world
Book Review of 2024 JCB Prize Longlist The Distaste of the Earth
Exotic Landscape (1910), oil on canvas by Henri Rousseau. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s enigmatically titled new book, The Distaste of the Earth, retells a Khasi folktale of star-crossed love. Similar to Funeral Nights (Context, 2021), which offered a documentation of the Khasi people’s traditional stories and cultural practices tied around
The restless traveller: A vignette | A Bengali Story in Translation
He was walking through an impassable thorny way. At one stage he turned back and saw millions of steadfast gazes fixed upon him. An incandescent lustre of seething excitement and expectation radiated from those gazes. It filled the traveller’s heart with an intoxicating pride. With a smile of profound satisfaction,
Bookshelf | New Books on the Shelves This Fortnight (November 1, 2024)
Francis Itty Cora T.D. Ramakrishnan, translated by Priya K Nair HarperCollins India Rs.399 This Malayalam classic is a genre-bender combining history, myth, mystery and magic. Set in present-day Kerala, war-torn Iraq, ancient Alexandria, and Renaissance Florence, the novel is a romp through history. ___ Jahanara Sukumaran Eka Rs.399 Shah Jahan’s
Ranjit Hoskote’s Translation of Mir Taqi Mir: An Attempt of Failure
Mir Taqi Mir in 1786. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons Let me admit that I am a votary of the following falsifiable proposition that is almost a cliché among those who follow Urdu poetry: A great poet creates a new idiom for the language. This proposition yields the following corollary
Baburao Bagul’s ‘Lootaloot’: A Deep Dive into the Struggles of the Oppressed in Mumbai
In the titular story of Baburao Bagul’s classic short story collection Maran Swasta Hot Aahe (Death is Becoming Cheap)—published in Marathi in 1969 and now available in translation as Lootaloot—a poet and short story writer walks through the city in search of a muse but finds, instead, sordid stories of the dispossessed. “This