YEARBOOK: INDIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH 2024-2025 Edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar And Vinita Agrawal

 

The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English is a series of anthologies, published every year, of poems originally written in English by poets from Indian and the Indian diaspora. The series is founded jointly by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita Agrawal.

 

THE REVIEW COMMITTEE FOR THE 2024-25 EDITION:

Kinshuk Gupta | Mamang Dai | Pramila Venkateswaran | Sivakami Velliangiri | Smitha Sehgal

The Committee is a beautiful blend of experienced and accomplished poets from India and abroad, alongside young and acclaimed names, who contribute to our vibrant literary heritage with this yearbook.

It is hoped that the exercise of bringing out such anthologies will prove to be fertile ground for establishing the aesthetics of Indian poetry in English. In the context of the instabilities and uncertainties experienced acutely in contemporary life, it is not surprising that many poems in the Yearbook emerge creatively from a special focus on home, house, identity, roots and indeed the question of language which is also deeply linked with the idea of homing.

This edition pays tribute to the Padma Shri awardee, poet and critic, Keshav Malik, on his birth centenary. The Yearbook also showcases the bilingual poet K. Satchidanandan as a Beacon Light of Indian Poetry in English.

Beginning with this volume, the Yearbook will feature an overview of Indian poetry in English published during the year, mapping poetry in English by Indians in India and abroad. Basudhara Roy an academic who is also a poet, highlights, in the first of these surveys, major thematic trends and forms visible in the poems published in 2024.

The Yearbook demonstrates the continued use of English as an indigenous Indian bhasha allowing the language of the region or community to be present in the poet’s consciousness. The mother tongue is not shunned as an interference but is negotiated with English, enriching thus the creative expression. The world has acknowledged authentic Indian English by awarding writers and poets with noteworthy awards. That same kind of authenticity of expression is evident in poetry in English today. The accelerated progress of such use of English can be traced ino the work archived in these Yearbooks, demonstrating the confident autonomy of the poet in choosing their own English. This volume of the Yearbook speaks powerfully against the atrocities in Gaza, in the voice of a poet from India’s North-East, among others. Periodicals The Bombay Literary Magazine, EKL Review and Muse India have nominated poems for consideration from the Yearbook in the past. This year, adding to this list is Wasafiri, a UK based publication.

While the poems submitted in each of the last five years for the Yearbook have been of a notable calibre, the year 2024-2025 has seen a significant leap in the number of remarkable poems received. This is what made the selection this year a very challenging task.

– Excerpted from the Foreword

ABOUT THE EDITORS:

SUKRITA PAUL KUMAR is a poet, scholar, critic and author who has won multiple prizes for her work, most recently the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2023. A former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and holder of the Aruna Asaf Ali Chair at Delhi University, she is series co-editor of the “Writer in Context” series published by Routledge, and the Guest Editor of Indian Literature, the journal of the Sahitya Akademi (Indian Academy of Letters).

VINITA AGRAWAL has authored five books of poetry, and won the Proverse Prize, the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize and the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence, USA. She is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize, Co-chair for the Global Council for Excellence for Environment and Sustainability, and one of the twenty poets to be featured in a Taiwanese documentary on Asian poets, Deepest Uprising.

POETS INCLUDED IN THE YEARBOOK 2024-25

A.J. Thomas

Abhijit Sarmah

Aditi Bhattacharjee

Aekta Khubchandani

Afsar Mohammad

Aftab Yusuf Shaikh

Ajanta Paul

Alka Balain

Amit Shankar Saha

Amlanjyoti Goswami

Anant Mohan

Anindita Kar

Anita Nahal

Anju Kishore

Ankush Banerjee

Anu Majumdar

Aparna Chivukula

Arjun Rajendran

Arti Jain

Asijit Datta

Athira Unni

Atreyee Majumder

Barnali Ray Shukla

Basudhara Roy

Beena E.S.

Bhaswati Ghosh

Bilal Moin

Bina Sarkar Ellias

Boudhayan Mukherjee

Brindha Vinodh

Brishti Roy

Christina Daniels

Debasish Mishra

Debmalya Bandyopadhyay

Debolina Dey

Devashish Makhija

Dibyajyoti Sarma

Durga Prasad Panda

Gautam Vegda

Gayatri Lakhiani Chawla

Gobinda Biswas

Gopal Lahiri

Gopikrishnan Kottoor

Huzaifa Pandit

Indu Parvathi

Jahnavi Gogoi

Jaydeep Sarangi

Jennifer Robertson

Jinju S.

Jyotish Chalil Gopinathan

Kabir Deb

Kala Ramesh

Kamalakar Bhat

Kashiana Singh

Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca

Kavita Ratna

Kinjal Sethia

Kris Kaila

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih

Lakshmi Kannan

Lopamudra Basu

M.J. Neela

Maaz Bin Bilal

Mandakini Bhattacherya

Mani Rao

Meena Kandasamy

Megha Sood

Mohua Chinappa

Neha Bansal

Pallavi Narayan

Pooja Garg

Pramila Venkateswaran

Prathibha Nandakumar

Preeti Vangani

Priya Narayanan

Priyanka Sacheti

R Suresh Babu

Rahana K. Ismail

Rajiv Mohabir

Ranjit Hoskote

Richa Sharma

Ronita Chattopadhyay

Rupa Anand

Sambhu R.

Sampurna Chattarji

Sandeep Kumar Mishra

Sandip Chauhan

Sangeeta Sharma

Sangita Kalarickal

Sanjeev Sethi

Saraswati Nagpal

Satya Dash

Sekhar Banerjee

Shalim M Hussain

Shanta Acharya

Sheena Laxmi

Shibani Phukan

Shikha Malaviya

Shikha Sawhney Lamba

Shikhandin

Shilpa Dikshit Thapliyal

Shoba Narayan

Shripad Sinnakaar

Sivakami Velliangiri

Sneha Roy

Snehal Vadher

Soni Somarajan

Suchi Govindarajan

Suchita Parikh-Mundul

Sudeep Sen

Sulekha Sarkar

Sunayna Pal

Sunil Sharma

Susmita Bhattacharya

Sutanuka Ghosh Roy

Tansy Troy

Teji Sethi

Tishani Doshi

Uma Gowrishankar

Unmana

Vidya Shankar

Vinay Sharma

Vivek Sharma

PRAISE FOR THE YEARBOOK OF INDIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH:

‘I applaud you (the Editors) for putting together the Yearbook… to celebrate all the ways that poetry has been written and celebrated in English over the last year’

– Christopher Merrill, Director of the Iowa Writing Program, Iowa, USA

‘Marvellous endeavour. I’ve been struck by the diversity of the poems and the locations of the poets. The Yearbook sits very well in the larger family of anthologies. It also makes up for a certain deficit that you have with periodic anthologies that might appear once in ten years. This is a good way of mapping and addressing the (poetry) scene as vibrant as it is, through a series of yearbooks benchmarking the scene of anglophone poetry in India’

– Ranjit Hoskote, Poet and Art Curator, Mumbai

‘A barometer of the poetry climate, the political climate of the nation. It is a very important record of what is being written and thought of by poets. Clearly the Yearbook (stems) from a deeply felt need. This was missing from the poetry scene. A valuable archive for students, readers and editors who would like to have some reference material of the poetry being written by Indians’

– Sampurna Chattarji, Writer, Editor and Translator

‘Editing a poetry yearbook in India is a Himalayan task considering its huge scope and cultural diversity.… a marathon venture made possible by the editors’ commendable spirit for inclusivity and commitment to poetry.’

– Jaydeep Sarangi, Poet; Anthologist; Principal, New Alipore College, Kolkata; and President of the Guild of Indian English Writers, Editors and Critics

| 216 pages | Paperback Rs 499 |

Published by Pippa Rann Books & Media | Distributed by Penguin Random House India