Word Masala Awards
Word Masala Awards Ceremony and Readings (By Invitation Only)
22 June 2016 6 pm
The House of Lords
Committee Room 4A, St Stephen’s Hall, London SW1A 0PW
Readings by: Debjani Chatterjee, Daljit Nagra, Meena Alexander, Reginald Massey, Shanta Acharya, Usha Kishore, Siddhartha Bose, Usha Akella, Mona Dash, Bobby Nayyar and myself.
Organised by Word Masala Director Yogesh Patel
A Tapestry of Dreams
Readings by Indian Women Diaspora Poets
23 June 2016 / 6.30 pm
The Nehru Centre / 8 South Audley Street, London W1K 1HF
This is a free event and all are welcome.
I will be reading recent poems along with Meena Alexander, Shanta Acharya, Mona Dash and Usha Akella. Full details below:
The Whole Kahani
Short Stories from The Whole Kahani
Readings at the Nehru Centre, London on 26 May 2016
From London to Goa, Manchester to Mumbai, this anthology includes tales that span virtual gigolos, start-ups, girl crushes, obsessive fans and astrological mishaps. An eclectic mix explores love and loss across the dividing lines of culture, race and ethnicity. Love is celebrated, broken and forgotten; is embraced and remembered, in this collection of stories of heartbreak and resilience.
“The Whole Kahani” (The Complete Story), is a collective of British fiction writers of South Asian origin. The group was formed in 2011 to provide a creative perspective that straddles cultures and boundaries both emotional and geographical. Members of The Whole Kahani are: Kavita A. Jindal, Dimmi Khan, Reshma Ruia, Mona Dash, Radhika Kapur, Rohan Kar, C.G. Menon, Farrah Yusuf, Iman Qureshi and Shibani Lal.
They will read excerpts from the group’s first compilation ‘Love Across A Broken Map’ by Dahlia Publishing.
The evening will include time for discussion and a brief Q&A session on The Whole Kahani and the making of this anthology.
More information on the writers in the collective can be found on: http://thewholekahani.weebly.com/members.html
Programme for 26 May, 2016 at The Nehru Centre, 8 South Audley Street, London W1K 1HF.
Reception at 6 pm
Readings at 6.30 pm
Event ends at 8.30 pm
This is a free event and everyone is welcome.
Experiencing Elsewhere
SOAS, London / Tuesday 10th November 2015 / 3-5 pm
Russell Room, SOAS, University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H OXG
What does it mean to inherit different cultures and social spaces, and how does poetry articulate or translate the experience of elsewhere?
Poetry readings by Kavita Jindal, Sean Wai-keung, Kirsten Irving and Jennifer Wong,
chaired by Dr Cosima Bruno
Poem:Films for National Poetry Day
‘Poem:Films’ For National Poetry Day – 8 October 2015
Caroline Areskog Jones has created two shorts using words from my poems.
‘Parakeet’ and ‘Chaining the Ecstatic‘
View the ‘Poem:Films’ on youtube:
Parakeet
Chaining the Ecstatic
Texts of the poems:
Parakeet
You were brought here caged
then let go
you stayed
your mewls and chweek chweek
are incessant
you’re scarcely still
flap flap perch flap flap
you invader
you drove out the weaker
your obnoxious brightness
streaming against the grey weather
Where can you go
other than the trees nearby
after you found yourself
in unfamiliar terrain
you cannot roll back
to the moment of
the capturing hand
in that other land
you settle and multiply
your pattern unchanged
being lustrous being avian
You’re noisy because
you like gatherings
all squawking together
morning and dusk
when you feed
midday saved for
preening and loafing
nights for some quiet
breaking out at dawn
how well you’ve adapted
to being non-tropical.
Chaining the Ecstatic
As the white light on this summer’s day
is pulled back into the molten sky
white flowers begin to gleam
fresh against green hedges
in the slowpouring darkness.
White flowers gleam
while the garden’s other beauties
the scalding pinks
recede with the last of the light
dissolving into stems, pots, fences.
So heaven this is where I find you
laying your silk sheet on me
while I stand still in June
inhaling the white bouquet of life.
Poems On Buses
One of my poems was selected to be a ‘poem-on-the-move’, in a bus in Guernsey, from May to September 2014.
The poem was originally titled ‘March Misery Poem’.
Kudos to the judge; that was my reaction.
On the poster though, the key middle word has been abandoned. I can see that they don’t want bus passengers to be reading a ‘misery poem’ even though the title was tongue-in-cheek.
Thanks to the efforts of Liz Kerr (the photographer) and Jenny Down I have these great pictures of my poem on a bus.
