Curtain raiser: The Goa Arts and Literature Festival 2018 (HT)
Frederick Noronha
Curtain raiser: The Goa Arts and Literature Festival 2018
GALF 2018 will feature a host of interesting writers from India and abroad
books Updated: Nov 22, 2018 22:22 IST
Hindustan Times
The ninth edition of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival will be held at the International Centre in Goa from December 6 to 8, 2018. Among the notable writers who will attend the event are David Gilmour, Perumal Murugan, Deborah Baker, Manjushree Thapa, Ramachandra Guha, Elizabeth Flock, Shanta Gokhale and Sudhir Kakkar.
A writer and historian, David Gilmour has written biographies of Rudyard Kipling, Lord Curzon and the Italian writer, Giuseppe di Lampedusa. The author of The Ruling Caste: Imperial Loves in the Victorian Raj (2005), a study of the Indian Civil Service in the Victorian era, and The British in India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience (2018), he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Perumal Murugan, who writes in Tamil is famous for his novels that include Poonachi: Or the Story of a Black Goat (2018), Pyre (2016), One Part Woman (2015), and Seasons of the Palm (2017).
Deborah Baker is the author of A Blue Hand, an account of Allen Ginsberg’s travels in India that traced the idea of India in the American imagination. Her latest book is the well received The Last Englishman: Love, War and the End of Empire.
Manjushree Thapa’s latest novel All of Us in Our Own Lives (2016) was set in the world of international aid in Nepal. She has recently translated Indra Bahadur Rai’s classic Darjeeling novel, There’s a Carnival Today(2017), into English.
Historian and biographer Ramachandra Guha needs no introduction. His books include The Unquiet Woods (1989); and an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (2002), India after Gandhi (2007), Gandhi Before India (2014), and most recently, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World (2018).
Novelist and short story writer Shashi Deshpande’s latest work, Listen to Me, her memoirs, have just been published. She has numerous books and translations to her credit.
Psychoanalyst, novelist and scholar Sudhir Kakar’s latest novel is The Kipling File.
With such a line-up of extremely interesting authors, this edition of GALF looks set to be a grand success.
First Published: Nov 22, 2018 22:22 IST
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Jeanne Hromnik
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The ninth edition of the Goa Arts & Literature Festival will be held from December 6 to 8. NT BUZZ chats with the founders to see what’s in store
Janice Savina Rodrigues | NT BUZZ
Goa’s literature scenario has been constantly evolving; and with four prominent languages in the literary arena, it seems to be ever growing. In a bid to get the locals more involved and provide them access to good literature, nine years ago, a few litterateurs decided to get their heads together and conceptualise a rather intimate festival to celebrate their love for the written word and art.
Working on an idea thrown in their midst by poet Eunice de Souza who passed on last year, Damodar Mauzo and Vivek Menezes, with other literary persons decided to focus the theme of the festival on the “different ways of belonging.” Mauzo says the idea of the festival was initially thought of as a tribute to a pillar of Goan literature Balakrishna Bhagwant ‘Bakibab’ Borkar. “It was his centenary birth year (in 2010) and we wanted to do something about it, so we decided to host a festival and it was a plus point that I had my literary connections already intact. But Borkar was not only a litterateur, he was also a fond supporter of art and his contemporaries like Angelo da Fonseca, so we decided to give due credit to arts as well,” says Mauzo. And this saw the birth of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival.
“This year apart from the focus on the recurring theme of belongingness, we are also focusing on new voices. We have a lot of new writers who have been doing good work. We also focus on Goa’s linguistic diversity be it Konkani, Marathi, English or Portuguese. As with previous editions we are also stressing on the genre of translation, given how important it is linguistically and culturally to get things translated into various languages,” adds co-founder Vivek Menezes.
Hosting the festival at the International Centre Goa was the result of fate playing its game. “When we began the planning process almost ten years back, we were looking for a venue and co-incidentally the ICG was also looking to host a festival focusing on literature and hence we joined hands and with their support we have managed to get some great writers on board,” says Mauzo.
Vivek adds that this year there are exclusive launches scheduled of books by American biographer Deborah Baker and the British historian David Gilmour who will both be present at the 3-day festival. Interestingly the festival will be inaugurated by two of India’s prominent writers. On December 6 at the Maquinez Palace complex in Panaji, the festival will open with keynote addresses by novelist and writer Shashi Deshpande, and the multi-disciplinary litterateur, Jerry Pinto.
Giving its due credit to the arts, the festival’s inaugural will also see the unveiling of the official GALF 2018 artwork, created by the Goan artist, Viraj Naik. Naik speaking about his thought process while working on the poster said that he tried to bring art and literature together. “I have tried to combine the two and yet kept it simple. I have drawn an artist painting contrasted with a writer reading a book. And since the festival touches upon several human issues I have drawn human faces around the canvas, of people I have done portraits of in the past,” says Naik.
Ask Mauzo if he really thought the festival would grow so big, his response is that he never expected it to last this long, let alone grow. “We didn’t expect it to continue for so long, but it has and it has also got a lot of appreciation. So many people who have come here before are now big names in the literary world. I don’t mean to say that this is because of the festival, they have done brilliant work in their own right, but this festival has been one of their jumping boards,” he says.
Talking about the growth he also points out that though there is potential in the festival, it has not been tapped. While other literature festivals are a crowd puller and attract tourists of high thinking capacity, the government has not been able to increase the footfalls due to GALF. “The resources are minimal, the government support is not as high as compared to other states, this is an excellent opportunity to tap the intelligent tourist but this is not happening much,” he says.
But having said that, Mauzo is also quick to add that he is proud of the festival’s niche audience. “I have been to several other festivals, but the intimate setting and the close proximity of the literature community is often missing. GALF may be smaller but readers get better access to writers and novelists here than anywhere else,” concludes Mauzo.
(For details visit www.goaartlitfest.com)
A glimpse of the writers taking part in GALF 2018
David Gilmour
English writer and historian David Gilmour has several prize-winning biographies including those of Rudyard Kipling, Lord Curzon and the Italian writer, Giuseppe di Lampedusa. He has also written several books on Spain and the Middle East including The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples (2011). Gilmour is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Oxfordshire.
Perumal Murugan
Indian author, scholar and literary chronicler Perumal Murugan writes in Tamil, with six novels, four collections of short stories and four anthologies of poetry to his credit. The translated novels include Poonachi: Or the Story of a Black Goat (2018); Current Show (2017); Pyre (2016); One Part Woman (2015); and Seasons of the Palm (2017). One Part Woman, his best-known work, was shortlisted for the Crossword Award and won the prestigious ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman in 2015.
Vasudhendra
Bangalore based Kannada author Vasudhendra runs his own publication house, Chanda Pustaka. He has instituted the Chanda Pustaka Award which recognises young short story writers. Vasudhendra is also associated with local support groups for LGBT individuals. He has won the Kannada Sahitya Academy Book Prize. His award winning Nammamma Andre Nangishta (I like my mother) has been reprinted 20 times. His book Mohanaswamy chronicling the life of a young queer man has been translated into English, Spanish, Telugu, Malayalam and the Tamil, Marathi, and Hindi translations are in progress.
Salil Tripathi
Award-winning journalist and writer Salil Tripathi’s books include Offence: The Hindu Case (Seagull), The Colonel Who Would Not Repent (Aleph), and Detours: Songs of the Open Road (Tranquebar). The chair, Writers-in-Prison Committee at PEN International, he has been a correspondent in India and Singapore, and now lives in London. His awards include the Red Ink Award for human rights journalism from the Mumbai Press Club, Bastiat Award in the United States, and the Citibank Pan Asian Journalism Award in Hong Kong. His articles have appeared in publications around the world.
Deborah Baker
Deborah Baker’s first full-length book, a biography of the American modernist poet Laura Riding (In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, 1992) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2008 she published A Blue Hand, an account of Allen Ginsberg’s travels in India that also traced the idea of India in the American imagination. Her current book, The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire, for which she received support from the Guggenheim and Whiting Foundations was just published by Penguin Random House India. She lives in Aldona, Goa and Brooklyn, New York.
Suneeta Peres da Costa
Suneeta Peres da Costa was born in Sydney, Australia, to parents of Goan origin. She has published and produced across the genres of fiction, non-fiction, playwriting and poetry. Her debut novel, Homework, was published internationally in 1999; a novella Saudade, on the legacies of Portuguese colonialism and the Goan diaspora in Angola, was published by Giramondo in March 2018. Her literary honours include a Fulbright Scholarship, the Australia Council for the Arts BR Whiting Residency, Rome, and recently, an Asialink Arts Creative Exchange to the Australian and New Zealand Studies Centre at Himachal Pradesh University, India.
Manjushree Thapa
Author of ten books of fiction, non-fiction, and literary translation Manjushree Thapa’s novel All of Us in Our Own Lives (2016) tells of the moneyed world of international aid in Nepal. Since her first book Mustang Bhot in Fragments (1992), she has written among others, The Tutor of History (2001); Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy of Democracy (2005);Tilled Earth: Stories (2007); and The Lives We Have Lost: Essays and Opinions on Nepal (2012), She has recently translated Indra Bahadur Rai’s classic Darjeeling novel, There’s a Carnival Today(2017), into English. She was born in Kathmandu and lives in Toronto.
Prabda Yoon
Prabda Yoon started to write short stories immediately after his discharge from a six-month military service in 1998 in Thailand, and his first published book was Muang Moom Chak (City of Right Angles). He won the S E A Write Award and is widely credited as the populariser of “postmodern” writing in Thailand. Since his debut collection, Prabda has written and published numerous story collections, novels, essays, song lyrics, and screenplays. His writings have been translated to Japanese, English, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese. In early 2017, Tilted Axis Press released Yoon’s first book in English The Sad Part Was. His second English book, Moving Parts, was published in 2018.
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