Words Matter

Toto Funds the Arts 
is delighted to invite you to
Words Matter 

A conversation on the importance of words, the choice of words, and the origins of words

To mark TFA’s twentieth year, we present the first in a year-long series of activities – eminent poet, critic and translator K. Satchidanandan speaking to novelist Anjum Hasan against the background of his long and distinguished career in literature. TOTO Award winners for 2023 Aparna Chivukula (Creative Writing in English) and Dadapeer Jyman (Creative Writing in Kannada) will read selections from their work.

Date: Tuesday, 8 August 2023
Time: 6.30 p.m.
Venue: Bangalore International Centre, 7, 4th Main Road, Domlur II Stage, Bengaluru 560 071

K. SATCHIDANANDAN is a bilingual poet, critic, playwright, editor, fiction writer and travel writer. A winner of 61 literary awards, he has thirty-two collections of poetry in Malayalam, ten in English, seven in Hindi, and thirty collections in no less than eight foreign languages and all major Indian languages. He also has five books in English on Indian literature, innumerable translations from world poetry and around 20 edited works. A collection of resistance writing, Words Matter edited and introduced by him, was published by Penguin Random House in 2018.

ANJUM HASAN is a poet, novelist, short story writer and former Books Editor of The Caravan. Her poetry collection Street on the Hill won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2006. Her novels The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti and Lunatic in my Head; short story collections A Day in the Life and Difficult Pleasures; and her most recent novel, History’s Angel, have received critical acclaim. Her short stories, essays and poems have appeared in publications such as Granta, Wasafiri, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Asia Literary Review.

DADAPEER JYMAN, who won the 2023 TOTO Award for Creative Writing in Kannada, is a Kannada poet, writer, translator and a member of the Bangalore-based Queer Poets Collective. His short story anthology Neelakurinji won the 2022 National Sahitya Akademi Young Litterateur Prize and the 2021 Masti Venkatesh Iyengar Book Prize.

APARNA CHIVUKULA, winner of the 2023 TOTO award for Creative Writing in English, writes, draws and makes books. She teaches writing at Mount Carmel College in Bangalore. Her poems have been published in Poetry at Sangam as part of the New Indian English Poetry issue, 2022.