session 5

Literature in the City and the City in Literature

by V Ramaswamy


on Friday, February 21, 2025,
at 6:00 PM IST

School of Environment & Architecture
CKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091

This talk will look at the Bangla anti-establishment and experimental author, Subimal Misra (1943–2023), his formative influences, his gaze at the city of Calcutta / Kolkata, and the city’s geography in his writing.


about

V. Ramaswamy took up literary translation of voices from the margins after two decades of grassroots and public activism in support of the labouring poor in his city, Calcutta. He has translated Subimal Misra’s The Golden Gandhi Statue from America: Early Stories, Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories, Anti-Stories, This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale: Two Anti-Novels, and The Earth Quakes: Late Anti-Stories; Manoranjan Byapari’s novels, The Runaway Boy, The Nemesis and The Interloper. His translation of Adhir Biswas’s Memories of Arrival: A Voice from the Margins, was published in 2022, as were Shahidul Zahir’s Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas (co-translated with Shahroza Nahrin), and Why There Are No Noyontara Flowers in Agargaon Colony: Stories. His translation of the novel I See The Face, also by Zahir, was published in 2023, and that of the novel, Talashnama: The Quest, by Ismail Darbesh, in 2024. Ramaswamy has attended residencies at Sangam House, India, Writers Omi, USA, and Toji Cultural Foundation, Korea. He was selected for the Toji Fellowship in Wonju, Korea, in 2015, and the Literature Across Frontiers – Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship in creative writing & translation at Aberystwyth University, Wales, in 2016. Ramaswamy received the translation fellowship of the New India Foundation, and the PEN Presents translation grant in 2022. Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas was awarded the prize for best translated book for 2022 by the Bangla Translation Foundation (Dhaka).