30 January - 3 February 2025 | Hotel Clarks Amer, Jaipur
Maneesha Taneja an alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University teaches Spanish in Delhi University and translates between Spanish, English and Hindi. Her noteworthy translations include Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs into Hindi from Spanish and Nadine Gordimer’s collection of short stories, all three of them Nobel winners. Her recent translation of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island has received much critical acclaim.
Award winning Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina's novel, Un andar solitario entre la gente, recently translated into English as, To Walk Alone in the Crowd, is an absorbing part memoir, part novel and part chronicle of urban wandering. Deeply rooted in nostalgia of the mundane yet extraordinary, Molina's narrative is a skillful take on contemporary life and the profundity of the digital and concrete jungles around us. His other novels include In the Night of Time, Sepharad, and Like a Fading Shadow. In conversation with academic and author Maneesha Taneja, Molina gives us a peek into his writing style and the ecological and aesthetic inspirations behind his most recent work.
The language of music transcends all other languages. Yatindra Mishra’s book, Akhtari: The Life and Music of Begum Akhtar, has been sourced both from the original English and translations from Hindi. Akhtari Bai Faizabadi, or Begum Akhtar as she was better known, was among the greatest Indian singers of the last century. An anthology steeped in essays on her life and music, as well as remembrances by those who knew her well including icons such as Bismillah Khan, Kunal Ray, Lata Mangeshkar, Rita Ganguly, Saleem Kidwai, Shanti Hiranand, Sheila Dhar, Shubha Mudgal, Yogesh Praveen, Yunus Khan and others along with interviews with the legend herself. Mishra and Maneesha Taneja have woven together an ultimate tribute to this doyan of ghazals. In conversation with celebrated author and screenwriter Anu Singh Choudhary, they take us on an evocative journey through the life and times of an extraordinary woman.