Poetry Reading/In Conversation
Sep-24-2010 06:30PM - 08:00PM
8 South Audley Street
London
Poetics of Dislocation: A Poetry Reading by Meena Alexander followed by conversation with Lakshmi Holmstrom.
RSVP: sudeept@nehrucentre.org.uk
Author of six volumes of poetry including, Illiterate Heart (which won the PEN Open Book Award), Raw Silk and Quickly Changing River, Meena Alexander is the editor of Indian Love Poems. Her autobiography, Fault Lines, chosen as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books, was revised in 2003 to incorporate new material. She is the author of two novels and two academic studies on early English Romanticism. Her latest book, Poetics of Dislocation, appeared in 2009 in the Poets on Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press. Her fellowships include those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Arts Council of England. She has served on the jury of the Neustadt International Award in Literature and as an Elector, American Poets Corner, Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Recipient of the 2009 Distinguished Achievement Award in Literature from the South Asian Literary Association for contributions to American Literature, she is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center CUNY. A book of essays on her work, Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander (eds Lopamudra Basu and Cynthia Leenerts) has just appeared from Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK.
Writer and translator, Lakshmi Holmström has translated short stories and novels by the major contemporary writers in Tamil. Her most recent books are The rapids of a great river: the Penguin book of Tamil poetry, of which she is a co-editor; and The hour past midnight, a translation of a novel by Salma. In 2000 she received the Crossword Book Award for her translation of Karukku by Bama; in 2007 she shared the Crossword-Hutch Award for her translation of Ambai’s short stories, In a forest, a deer; and she received the Iyal Award from the Tamil Literary Garden, Canada, in 2008. In 2003-6, she was a Royal Literary Fund writing fellow at the University of East Anglia. She is one of the founding trustees of SALIDAA (South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive).
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