Described as the ‘greatest literary show on Earth’, the Jaipur Literature Festival is taking a virtual avatar this year due to the pandemic. This is the 14th edition of JLF and we will definitely miss the vibrancy of the physical event in the city.
Despite this, it makes us proud to tell that the Jaipur poet, Jagdeep Singh, will be featured at this virtual edition in February. A video of his reading some of his poems from the first collection ‘My Epitaph’, will be shown in the category of ‘New Writers Short Series’.
The anthology, published by Writers Workshop in Kolkata, comprises of poems, which are about a variety of topics like vagaries of life, the inevitability of death, the pangs of love, and even on the struggle of writing poetry. One special feature of the poems is that some of them are on well-known personas like Hemingway, Hamlet, Sylvia Plath, and even the protagonist of the well-known novel, Catch-22, ‘Yossarian’.
Dr. Ananda Lal, the man behind the Writers Workshop, Kolkata, which is fastidious about the Indo-English poetry they publish said for his poems: “Apart from their originality and sensitivity, they have the rare quality in an Indian poet of irony and readiness to laugh at oneself or about otherwise serious themes.”
The anthology will be officially launched at physical book events at the end of February both in Jaipur and New Delhi.
Despite the pandemic, let’s celebrate the joy of knowledge in a digital avatar at JLF 2021!