Friday, February 09, 2007

All right, let's be having you

Who wrote the story where the ragpicker turns out to be Shiva (Bhooter Raja, I think)
Also the Great Haraldo had a story I marked WIP which I now can't remember. Send!!!!! And all the rest of you too!

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Christopher Merrill

We had a visit from Professor Christopher Merrill on Friday.

Chris Merrill runs America's coolest writing programme, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He writes poetry and non-fiction, and he's written on soccer, the Balkan wars, and secretive Eastern orthodox monasteries.

On Friday, he spoke about his life as a writer, including how it felt to be stuck in a basement in Croatia being blitzed by the Serbs, and what to do if you're targeted by a sniper while on the way to a film festival. He also told us that according to the Serbs, the only unbiased journalists in the country were Indians(!) He reminisced about his friend Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri poet who (among other things) introduced the proper ghazal to America.

Chris's talk was followed by a lively interactive session. At the end of the session, Gautam Datta, an engineer based in New Jersey, read a poem in Bangla and his translation of one of Chris's English pieces.

Friday, February 02, 2007

Way-hay! We have mun-nay!

ALERT!!!!
We have been granted funding by the Seed Money fund to publish WIPlash. Everyone who hasn't yet sent me their stuff DO SO NOW. This includes anything I may have marked as suitable for WIP. Email of soft copy is best. If you don't have a comp, give it to me to be typeset. We will return pieces to be edited if they need polishing, or we may edit ourselves in consultation with authors. We are looking at about 80 pages of text and 20 of illustration. Deadline for texts is Feb 20th. NO EXTENSION!

we're also looking for illustrators for the stories and a cover designer. cover will be monochrome, can be grayscale. Apply to Teleute or Wiz of Az or comment this post.

A reminder: Caferati deadline on 4th

Cross posted from http://www.caferati.com/contests/


Contests
Caferati runs contests for writers directly, and in collaboration with other organisations. This page gives you updates on the latest. (You could also subscribe to our Contests newsletter to get alerts in your inbox.)

Writing contests at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2007

We are managing four contests for the Literature and Writing section of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2007.

Go straight through to the individual contest pages for details.

SMS Poetry — 160-character poetry — About | Submit
Flash Fiction — very short stories — About | Submit
Graphic Flash — very short stories, told with visuals — About | Submit
Poetry Slam — performance poetry, live and head-to-head — About | Submit
All these contests are open to anyone, anywhere. However, the Poetry Slam is a live event at the Festival, so it’s a bit pointless to submit if you live elsewhere, unless you are prepared to travel to Kala Ghoda for the event at your own expense, if you are selected.

The deadline for all of them is midnight, IST, 4th February, 2007.