Sampurna Chattarji

Sampurna Chattarji is a poet, fiction writer, translator, and editor. Her twenty books include the short story collection about Bombay/Mumbai, Dirty Love (Penguin); the novels Rupture and Land of the Well (HarperCollins); translations of Joy Goswami’s poetry—After Death Comes Water and Selected Poems (Harper Perennial); and nine poetry titles, the most recent being Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien (HarperCollins) and Over & Under Ground in Mumbai & Paris (Westland-Context). Her translation of Sukumar Ray is a Puffin Classic. She teaches writing to design students at IIT, Bombay; and is Poetry Editor for The Indian Quarterly. She lives in Thane.


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Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing

Anjum Hasan, Sampurna Chattarji

Publication Date: July 5, 2022

$28.95 Tradepaper

Description:

A diverse and essential anthology of poetry and fiction that springs from—and is shaped around—the shared heritage that contemporary Indian writers claim across time, location and language.

This anthology brings together one hundred contemporary Indian poets and fiction writers working in English as well as translating from other Indian languages. Located anywhere from Michigan to Mumbai, the sources of their creativity range from the ancient epics to twentieth-century world literature, with themes suggesting a modernist individuality and sense of displacement as well as an ironic, postmodern embracing of multiple disjunctions. The editors present a historical background to the various Englishes apparent in this collection, while also identifying the shared traditions and contexts that hold together their uniquely diverse selection. In aiming at coherence rather than unity, Hasan and Chattarji reveal that the idea of Indianness is as much a means of exploring difference as finding common ground.

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