An Evening With Perumal Murugan

Toto Funds the Arts

and

British Council Library, Bangalore

are delighted to invite you to

An evening with the celebrated Tamil writer

Perumal Murugan

in the company of his translator

N Kalyan Raman

to mark the publication of Kalyan Raman’s translation of Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi or The Story of a Black Goat 

Vijeta Kumar, who will be in conversation with the author and translator, will introduce the range of Perumal Murugan's literary works and the highs and lows of his writing career

Sharanya Ramprakash, actor, director and playwright, 

will read excerpts from the novel

Date: Saturday, 7 April 2018.  Time: 6.30 p.m.

Venue: British Council Library, Prestige Takt, 23, Kasturba Road Cross (Opposite Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum)

ENTRY IS FREE AND OPEN TO ALL!

PERUMAL MURUGAN heads the department of Tamil literature in a government college in Attur, Tamil Nadu. He is the author of ten novels and five collections each of short stories and poems, as well as ten books of non-fiction. Several of his novels, stories and poems have been translated into English, including Seasons of the Palm, which was short-listed for the Kiriyama Prize, Current Show, One Part Woman, Pyre and Poonachi, or The Story of a Black Goat. The first collection of Murugan's stories in English translation, The Goat Thief, was published last year. He has also written a memoir, Nizhal Mutrathu Ninaivugal.

N KALYAN RAMAN is a Chennai-based translator of Tamil fiction and poetry into English. His translations of 11 works of Tamil fiction and over 200 poems by leading Tamil poets have been published in journals and anthologies in India and abroad. He is a regular contributor of essays, articles and book reviews to journals and newspapers in India. In 2017, he received the prestigious Pudumaipithan award, given by Vilakku, for his contribution to Tamil literature through his translations.

VIJETA KUMAR, who was shortlisted for the TOTO Award for Creative Writing in English in 2018, teaches English and Journalism at St Joseph’s College, Bangalore.

Celebrating Jane Austen: Readings and Discussions

Toto Funds the Arts & The British Council Library

are pleased to invite you to

“The Sensibility of Jane Austen”

Marking the 200^th death anniversary of the Mistress of Irony

Date and Time:  Saturday, 22 July 2017, 6.30 p.m.

Venue:  The British Council Library, Prestige Takt, 23 Kasturba Road Cross (Opposite Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum), Bangalore

Readings of excerpts from her novels

 by the actors Lekha Naidu and Nakul Bhalla

&

A panel discussion between Cheriyan Alexander and Poorna Swami

moderated by C.K. Meena

Unpacking the life and times of this much-loved writer, her panoply of characters, and the continuing relevance of her work to our part of the world.

Dr Cheriyan Alexander, who has been teaching English at St. Joseph's College, Bangalore for over three decades, is currently Head of the Department of English at SJC. 

Poorna Swami is a writer and dancer who has been Editor-at-Large of the online literary quarterly Asymptote since 2015.

C.K. Meena, novelist/journalist, wishes that Austen’s novels and other unabridged classics weren’t foisted on her during her adolescence because they make so much more sense when read at a later age.

Poetry Reading: Poorna Swami & Kala Krishnan Ramesh

Toto Funds the Arts

is happy to invite you to

Sovereign over Words

readings from the poetry

of

Poorna Swami  &  Kala Krishnan Ramesh

who will be in conversation with Prasanna Chandrasekharan

Date and Time:  Friday, 4 November 2016, 6.30 p.m.

Venue:  Bookworm, 1, Church Street (Opposite Starbucks),

Bangalore

Poorna Swami is a writer and dancer who has been Editor-at Large of the online literary quarterly Asymptote since 2015.

Kala Krishnan Ramesh is a creative writing teacher and author of He is Honey, Salt and the Most Perfect Grammar, a collection of Bhakti poetry.

Prasanna Chandrasekharan, primarily a bibliophile, has also enjoyed teaching, and is now a freelance editor.

Lekha Naidu, Bangalore-based actor, will read selected poems from He is Honey, Salt and the Most Perfect Grammar.

Reading of Poetry on Poetry

Toto Funds the Arts

and

The British Council Library

are delighted to invite you to

“About Poetry”

A reading of poetry on poetry

Standing in the long shadow of World Poetry Day, we bring to light those poems that speak about themselves, and of how and why they are written.

The readers: Lekha Naidu and Nakul Bhalla (in English), Padmanabh Bhat, Prateek Mukunda and Sowmya Bhat (in Kannada)

The speakers: You!

Come, poetry lovers, poets-in-waiting, closet poets, known poets, tell us what you feel. Should poems be “written rarely and reluctantly”, “be damned, and published”? Is the purpose of poetry to “remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person”? Listen, react, reflect.

Date and Time:  Saturday, 26 March 2016, 6.30 p.m.

Venue:  The British Council Library, Prestige Takt, 23 Kasturba Road Cross (Opposite Visveswaraiah Industrial and Technological Museum)

Print and Silence

Silent reading is so common that we associate reading aloud with children and neo-literate adults. Print has produced a revolution in reading habits, enhanced by the development prose genres such as essays, short stories and novels. This has made silent reading so widespread that we now often regard it as the only mode of reading.

We clearly distinguish reading from singing, but not too long ago, texts in Indian languages were written in meter and read out loud, even when one was reading for oneself. While this was not singing, it was a certain way of articulation inseparable from the meaning of the text.

Have we lost something of the meaning of a text by silent reading? This lecture attempts to answer this question and in the process explores the nature of Indian text and the concept of ‘author’ in Indian literary culture.

Velcheru Narayana Rao taught Telugu and Indian literatures for thirty-eight years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also taught at the University of Chicago, and is currently Visiting Distinguished Professor of South Asian Studies at Emory. He has written more than fifteen books: Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, in collaboration with David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (New York: Other Press, 2003),Girls for Sale, Kanyasulkam: A Play from Colonial India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), and How Urvasi Was Won, a translation of Kalidasa's Vikramorvasiyam, in collaboration with David Shulman (Clay Sanskrit Library, 2009) are among his recent publications. 
Narayana Rao's scholarship spans many areas of cultural and literary history. Some of his ideas and perspectives, especially those relating to early modernity and oral communities in India, are unique.

This talk has been possible with the support of Raghu Tenkayala, Nagaraju Pappu and Sreenivas Paruchuri. 
E-vite design: Roshan Shakeel 

Celebrating Agatha Christie: Readings and Discussions

Toto Funds the Arts & The British Council Library

are pleased to invite you to

“And Then There Was One”

Celebrating the 125^th birth anniversary of the one and only Agatha Christie, grande dame of crime fiction 

Date and Time:  Friday, 18 September 2015, 6.30 p.m.

Venue:  The British Council Library, Prestige Takt, 23 Kasturba Road Cross (Opposite Visveswaraiah Industrial and Technological Museum), Bangalore

A panel discussion among authors C.K. Meena and Nilanjan Choudhury and publisher Arun Kumar, interspersed with readings of excerpts from her novels, plays and autobiography, will provide a bird’s eye view of Dame Agatha’s life and work, her enduring influence and the tricks of her trade.

Actors Lekha Naidu and Nakul Bhalla will read the excerpts.

Poetry and Fiction: Sampurna Chattarji and Zenisha Gonsalves

Toto Funds the Arts

in association with

Atta Galatta

is pleased to invite you to 

An evening with Space Gulliver and her alter ego Sampurna Chattarji 

while Zenisha Gonsalves serves a slice of hostel life on the side

Date and Time:  Friday, 3 July 2015, 6.30 p.m.

Venue:  Atta Galatta, 134, KHB Colony, 5th Block, Koramangala (Next to Jyoti Nivas College)

Join Sampurna Chattarji as she “careen[s] through varied terrain, geographic and linguistic, in a dizzy journey of defamiliarization” in the company of her “alien protagonist”, featured in her latest book of poetry from HarperCollins: Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an alien. And Zenisha Gonsalves reading her short story ‘I mean, I tell you’. 

SAMPURNA CHATTARJI is a poet, novelist, translator and children’s author. Her fourteen books include five poetry titles, two novels, and a short-story collection. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies. Sampurna is the editor of Sweeping the Front Yard, an anthology of women’s writing. Her poetry has been translated into 15 languages including Estonian, Frisian and Bambaiyya; and her children’s fiction into Welsh and Icelandic. Selected Poems (Harper Perennial, 2014), her translation of the Bengali poet Joy Goswami’s work, was shortlisted for the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry.

ZENISHA GONSALVES grew up in Goa. She's doing her BA in English Literature and Journalism at St Joseph’s College of Arts and Science, Bangalore. She has written for The Ladies Finger, Yahoo! Originals, and The Seattle Globalist. She was shortlisted for the Toto Award for Creative Writing in 2015.

Praise for Space Gulliver

‘Boldly playful, ingenious, associative and mercurial….Here is a book that blends intellectual enquiry, a taste for whimsy and a love of language into challenging and audacious poetry.’

– ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM, Poet and editor

 ‘The work is a joy to read….What worked was precisely the way the poet kept working the line and the voice, so that with each poem new resources emerged…. Something quite remarkable starts to happen at some point in this sequence so that by the end the reader – this reader anyway – is fully enfolded in Space Gulliver’s world.’

– DAVID HERD, Poet and professor of Modern Literature, University         of Kent