ninth version of Bengaluru Poetry Festival to be held within the metropolis

Subodh Sankar nonetheless remembers the primary time he heard the Odia poet Bishnu Mohapatra learn his work at Atta Galatta, a decade or so in the past. “He learn in Odia, and it gave me goosebumps…with out understanding a phrase of what he learn,” says the co-founder of Atta Galatta. “That is the facility of poetry,” believes Subodh, who, with a core crew of poets and poetry lovers, conceptualised the Bengaluru Poetry Festival as a celebration of all issues poetry, again in 2016.

Bishnu, “a really, very senior poet,” will probably be one of many many audio system who will probably be a part of the ninth Edition of the Bengaluru Poetry Festival, which will probably be held within the metropolis on August 2 and three. Some of the others embrace Ramya Nambessan, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, Sandhya Mridul, Justh, Jeet Thayil, Madhan Karky, Danish Husain and Bilal Moin.

“There are loads of huge names that we’re trying ahead to on the pageant,” says Subodh, including that the pageant ends with a efficiency by Parvathy Baul. Also, as at all times, the pageant will showcase poets in a number of languages, together with Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, and Mizo. “We are very happy with the truth that now we have been in a position to deliver poetry in so many alternative languages to town.”

This yr, for the primary time, the pageant will probably be held on the Indiranagar Sangeetha Sabha, “a normal efficiency venue with a phenomenal out of doors space”, as an alternative of a resort. “In that sense, the pageant has considerably decreased its footprint and gone again to nature, one thing we’re happy with,” says Subodh.

Another main change on this version, he provides, is the inclusion of many extra poets from outdoors the nation.” These embrace Sri Lankan poet Shirani Rajapakse, American author and poet Claudia Keelan, Singaporean poet and translator Daryl Lim Wie Jie and Emirati poets Ali AlMaazmi and Amal Al Sahlawi, “each of whom will probably be studying in Arabic.”

The pageant is instituting a fellowship for younger, unpublished poets aged 18-24, to be introduced on August 3, titled the Utkarsh Poetry Fellowship, in affiliation with Dr Neena Verma, a medical physician from Delhi. The fellowship, one other first for the pageant, is known as after Neena’s son, a poet himself who handed away at a younger age, bought kick-started a couple of month and a half in the past, when an announcement for the fellowship was made, explains Subodh. “We’ve had an amazing response, with a few hundred individuals responding, and now it’s going by the jury course of.”

This version will function roughly 86 audio system, together with the facilitators of the kids’s pageant, which can happen in parallel with the principle pageant, a vital side of the programming. “For the final 4 years, now we have had a youngsters’s pageant taking place alongside the poetry pageant,” says Subodh, who believes that it’s an effective way to introduce youngsters to the world of books. “Children who learn, flip into adults who learn and adults who learn flip into writers,” he says. “So we take any alternative we are able to to deliver youngsters to a literary environment.”

The ninth version of the Bengaluru Poetry Festival will probably be held on August 2 and three on the Indiranagar Sangeetha Sabha. Entry is free and all are welcome.