1 - 5 February 2024 | Hotel Clarks Amer, Jaipur
Aruni Kashyap writes in two languages: English and his native language, Assamese. He is the author of three books of fiction, His Father’s Disease: Stories, The House With a Thousand Stories, and Noikhon Etia Duroit. A winner of the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh, his poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News, was a finalist for the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and 2018 Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Catapult, Bitch Media, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, Literary-Hub, The Kenyon Review, and others. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, Athens, an Editor-at-large with the Southern Review of Books, and served as a jury member for the 2020 JCB Prize for Indian Literature.
The world in the last decade has acquainted itself to the gems of north eastern literature. Whilst for the uninitiated it is a new culture to explore, for those who have been avid readers of this literary tradition, its popularity in the mainstream comes as no surprise. However, how does one define North-eastern Literature, the sub-cultures that it is made up of and its boundaries? An illustrious panel evaluates the representation of language, dialect, and socio-political narratives of the eight states and explores the place of their authors within larger literary traditions.
Arupa Patangia Kalita's fiction is a chronicle of the disturbing and searing history of decades-long aggression and hate that plagued Assam. In conversation with her translator Ranjita Biswas alongside author Aruni Kashyap, she speaks about the surreally beautiful landscape of Assam, the conflict that scarred it and the role of a writer in fraught times.