Thursday 11 March, 2010

No booking required. 

Amarjit Chandan is widely regarded as one of the foremost contemporary poets of the Punjabi language. He has had eight books of poetry published in Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script as well as the Persian script in Lahore . He has worked for various Punjabi literary and political magazines, including the Mumbai-based Economic and Political Weekly and is a regular contributor to apnaorg.com and Sanjh magazine.

Chandan will be reading from his most recent publication Sonata for Four Hands, which is the first bilingual volume of a Punjabi poet ever published in the UK . Given that statistically Punjabi is the second most widely spoken language in Britain , here has been a marked absence of accessible translation of Punjabi poetry in the UK for more than eighty years. Sonata for Four Hands represents the span of Chandan’s work as well as a genuine act of co-translation. The preface has been written by the distinguished writer John Berger, long-time admirer of Chandan's work.

This event has been organised by Stephen Watts, who has published three books of poetry including The Lava’s Curl (Grimaldi Press, 1990), Gramsci & Caruso (Periplum, 2003), The Blue Bag (Aark Arts, 2004) as well as editing several anthologies, Houses & Fish, Voices of Conscience (an international anthology of censored poets, Iron Press, 1995), Mother Tongues (a special issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, 2001), and Music While Drowning (an anthology of German Expressionist poems that accompanied an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, Tate Publishing, 2003). Stephen will be reading a selection of his writing on the night. 

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