Despite the pandemic, literary festivals and magazines around the world continue to highlight important voices, both emerging and established. In India, the Bangalore Literature Festival presented a series of literary conversations, while the Sahitya Akademi announced the winners of its various awards. In Guatemala, the literary community mourned the loss of the beloved writer and editor, Julio Calvo Drago. In Palestine, the first-ever edition of Granta in Arabic was published. Read on to find out more!
Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India
Despite the restrictions COVID imposed, 2021 was a successful year for literature in India, with many virtual festivals and award ceremonies.
In Bangalore, the tenth edition of the Bangalore Literature Festival commenced in a hybrid form at the Bangalore International Center. Featuring authors such as Chitra Divakaruni, Dolly Kikon, Jahnavi Barua, Vivek Shanbhag, and Rijula Das, the festival was spread over two days. In one conversation, sociologist Arshia Sattar and filmmaker Anmol Tikoo introduced a new literary podcast on the life of Kannada playwright Girish Karnad. Titled “The River Has No Fear of Memories,” a line taken from the English translation of the play Hayavadana, the podcast follows the life of Karnad, including his work, inspirations, and personal life.
Sahitya Akademi also announced the winners of its prestigious awards: the Sahitya Akademi Award, Yuva Puraskar, and Bal Sahitya Puraskar 2021 on December 30. Twenty authors writing in different Indian languages were awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award. The award for the Sahitya Akademi in the Tamil language was given to Ambai for her short story collection Sivappu Kazhuththudan Oru Pachai Paravai (A Red-Necked Green Bird). Born in 1944 in Coimbatore, Ambai is only the fourth woman to win the award in her category, in the sixty-six years of the award’s history.
Ambai’s work has challenged patriarchal notions for more than half a century and inspired a feminist movement in writing. In her award-winning collection, she writes about ordinary middle-class women in Bombay, who travel in the local train and live in small apartments known as chawls. The stories explore the challenges of family life, the elderly, the disabled, and the loneliness of age. The collection has been translated into English by GJV Prasad.
“What is to be a good woman is something defined and pre-planned. Drawing a kolam, cooking and keeping the husband in good humour defines an ideal woman and this is questioned by my characters,” Ambai said about her work in an interview with The Hindu. The author works for women’s rights outside literature and founded the NGO Sound and Pictures Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW). She has published seven collections of short stories. The Yuva Puraskar award in English was given to Megha Majumdar for her debut novel A Burning, along with twenty-one writers for other Indian languages.
José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America
On December 20th, beloved Guatemalan writer and editor, Julio Calvo Drago passed away at fifty-two years old. He wrote books such as Megadroide Morfo-99 contra el Samuray Maldito (1998), El retorno del cangrejo parte cuatro ERDCP4 (2001), and Cero Coma Cero (2009). For years, he shared his writings on a site called Hypertexta. He was known for his whimsical, highly imaginative, experimental, humorous, and idiosyncratic literature. He famously mixed hyperrealism, science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, illustration, pop culture, social commentary, historical fiction, and even coding language. Novel, poetry, microfiction, essays, advertising—he experimented with them all, often simultaneously.
In his early work, we find androids fighting samurais, two clowns robbing people on a bus, a military man named Rambo López who fought against the guerrillas during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996), Milan Kundera talking with Fred Flintstone, stories written on a milk carton, and a peacock spreading its feathers, thinking he can impress a group of people at a shopping mall.
In recent years, Julio wrote memorable YA books, such as Más intrincado que un laberinto (2016), La chica que mandaba a los hombres por un tubo (2017), and Basilio y los lactonautas (2018), in which he continued to experiment with plot, structure, humor, fantasy, and science fiction.
Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine
Somewhere on Salah al-Deen al-Ayyoubi street in East Jerusalem, there is a concealed gem at a place called The Educational Bookshop. It is a well-known address for both locals and foreign Jerusalemites, and is now the house of the gem that has been in the making for the past two years and now the talk of the town.
In 2020, the owners of the bookshop, Imad and Mahmoud Muna, were commissioned by Granta to publish the first-ever edition of Granta in Arabic. Earlier this winter, to the joy and pride of Arab readers, the anthology was released with the thematic title “Escape.”
Mahmoud curated this impressive selection of the most creative and promising writers from around the Arab world and honoured the magazine by publishing its first Arabic edition from Al-Quds (Jerusalem in Arabic). The writer and editor Eyad Barghuthy edited the collection, which consists of twenty-four creative pieces, including a comic, two poems, and three photo-based essays.
In his editorial, Barghuthy writes that “the texts of this first Arab issue tell a story of multiple voices, strata, places, and times. Texts whose chapters are written, without coordination, by Arab writers from Palestine, Syria, and Jordan accompanied by writers with a literary experience, peering at you from the windows of Arab and international capitals and cities. Those are texts that narrate ‘escape’; escaping to and in exiles, escaping from and to memory, escaping from death, and to writing; escaping from escape itself.”
While several of the authors are emerging names with an enjoyable grasp of language and life, the anthology also features established names, such as Saleem Albeik, Maya Abu Alhayyat, Akram Musallam, Majd Kayyal, and Abbad Yahya. The beautiful cover was illustrated by the Gaza-based artist Mohammed Al Hawajri.
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