Toto Funds the Arts (TFA) announced its fifth annual awards for young photographers, writers and musicians at a function held at the Alliance Francaise, Bangalore, on 12 January 2009. Mr T S Satyan, the renowned photojournalist, was the Chief Guest.
The purpose of the Toto Awards is to recognize potential in the arts and encourage young people to pursue their talent. The awards were instituted in memory of Angirus Toto Vellani who was passionate about the arts.
Creative Writing
The two creative writing awards went to Aditi Machado from Bangalore and Neel Chaudhuri from New Delhi, who received Rs 25,000 each. The jurors for this award were writer, translator and critic Shanta Gokhale, novelist and columnist CK Meena, and professor of English and quiz master Arul Mani.
Aditi Machado, an undergraduate at Mount Carmel College, entered nearly 50 short poems for the award. The jury commented that she “has a talent for sparseness. This is an extraordinarily luminous poetry-sequence.” Neel Chaudhuri, who has been involved with theatre for the past ten years, submitted a play ‘Godspeed’. The jury said that the play “is remarkably well-structured, revealing an imagination that is finely attuned to the stringent requirements of performance”.
Music
The music award was won by Another Vertigo Rush, a Delhi-based rock band. The jurors, Radhakrishnan Nair, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, and Uday Benegal, writer, filmmaker and one-time frontman of the well-known band Indus Creed, praised the band for their “very, very punchy songs, great sound, great ideas”. The band will be awarded a record deal with Counter Culture Record to bring out their first CD, and also receive an equipment voucher worth Rs 15,000.
Photography
Sohrab Hura from Gurgaon and Amit Madheshiya from Mumbai received a cash prize of Rs 25,000 each for winning the two awards for photography. The jurors for this award – well-known photographers Navroze Contractor and Ryan Lobo, and Abhishek Poddar, the inspiration behind Tasveer – remarked that Amit’s “images of children in an often harsh urban landscape have a strong narrative, telling an immensely poignant story truthfully”. Sohrab’s photography was commended for being “personal, honest and powerful. His endeavour is suffused with suffering, loneliness and love”.
Ten short-listed applicants received special jury commendations. Among these, Allegro Fudge (music), Umeed Mistry (photography) and Deepika Arwind, Ram Ganesh Kamatham and Swar Thounaojam (creative writing) were present to receive their certificates from the Chief Guest.
The winners of the writing awards read from their work, while the photography awardees showed and discussed their images.
TFA will invite applications for the 2010 awards in August 2009.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Friday, January 9, 2009
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Reading: January 2009
The readers this month are:
Venue: Crossword Bookstore, ACR Towers,
Ground Floor, 32 Residency Road, Bangalore - 1
Date and time: Thursday, 8 January 2009 at 6.30 pm
Trina Nilina Banerjee is 27 years old. She is a Kolkata -based writer, actor and director. Her poems have been published in, among others, the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and The Little Magazine. Her first volume of poetry, Inside a Blue Corridor (Writers Workshop) came out in 2001. Her experimental prose writings and short stories have appeared in the literary supplement of The Statesman. An experienced theatre performer, she has also directed several plays. In 2005, Trina’s lead role in Nisshabd (directed by Jahar Kanungo) won her the Best Actress Award at the 7th Osian Film Festival in Delhi. In 2007, Chinese Whispers, a film by Raka Dutta, in which Trina plays a rag-picker, was selected as the only official Indian entry to the Cannes Film Festival. In 2008, she acted in national-award winning director Suman Mukhopadhyay’s film Chaturanga (based on the Tagore novel), where her performance as the silent and oppressed Nanibala was much appreciated by film critics and audiences alike.
Mariam Karim-Ahlawat was educated at the JNU, New Delhi and the Sorbonne, Paris, where she studied French Literature and Pedagogy. Mariam writes fiction for both children and adults. Her first children’s book, Tales Old and New, was published by Harper Collins in 1994. In 2007, Tulika Books published her Putul and the Dolphins in six Indian languages and The King and the Kiang in eight languages. Gulla and the Hangul is scheduled to appear shortly. In 2003, her novel, My Little Boat, published by Penguin India, was nominated for the International IMPAC Award and the Hutch Crossword Award. Over the years, Mariam’s short stories and reviews have appeared in various magazines and journals, most recently in the South Asia Review, USA, and the PEN Anthology of Women Writers, Our Voice, Volume III. Mariam also writes about education and society in a regular column called ‘Guruspeak’ for The Times of India Pluses (north India),
See you there!
Results? Soon, very soon
Toto Funds the Arts will announce the winners of the Toto Awards 2009 for music, photography and creative writing on January 12 at a public function.
Venue: Alliance Française de Bangalore, Thimmaiah Road, Vasanth Nagar, Bangalore
Date: 12 January 2009
Time: 7.30 pm
The renowned photo-journalist T. S. Satyan will be the Chief Guest. The award winners will present their work at the function. Applicants wishing to know the results should check this blog on or after 16 January, when all the information will be available.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)