German / Urdu / Kashmiri poetry with contemporary music
Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival 2019 and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata present "Alif & Almut" Live. German / Urdu / Kashmiri poetry with contemporary music
Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival and its section for young readers, the
Oxford Junior Literary Festival will be held from 18 - 20 January 2019 at various venues along Park Street. The festival celebrates books, music, art, film, and more with the finest creative minds in the nation and globally, as events unfold at the city’s magnificent heritage sites.
For the full programme of AKLF, please click HERE
Alif and Almut come together once again, after their sold-out performance at Edward theatre Mumbai for Poets Translating Poets festival and a concert at Bengaluru Poetry Festival.
https://bit.ly/2fj5BU1
Enjoy the sound of poetry!
About the artists
Ulrike Almut Sandig: Performance Poet
http://ulrike-almut-sandig.de/english/
Ulrike Almut Sandig was born in Großenhain (GDR) in 1979 and now lives with her family in Berlin. She started publishing her poetry by pasting poems onto lamp posts and spreading them on flyers and free post cards. After completing her Magister in Religious Studies and Modern Indology, she graduated from the German Creative Writing Program Leipzig.
She collaborates with filmmakers, composers, sound artists and musicians from all over the world and has won many prizes, including the Leonce and Lena Prize in 2009 and the Literary Prize of the Federation of German Industries in 2017. Besides her many radio plays and audio-books of poetry and music she has published two books of short stories—Flamingos and Book Against Disappearing—and four volumes of poetry.
In 2015 Ugly Duckling Presse (USA) launched a selection of her early poems in English translation. In 2016 Karen Leeder’s stunning translations of Sandig’s poetry „Thick of it“ (Seagull Books) won the English PEN translation Pitch and have been awarded with an PEN America/Heim Translation Fund Grant. In 2018 she launched her debut album with her Poetry-band LANDSCHAFT and her latest poetry "Grimm" (Hurst Street Press).
Alif: German, Urdu & Kashmiri poetry with contemporary music. Poetry Music Performance
Spoken and sung poetry steeped in Urdu and Kashmiri culture and recounted by singer-songwriter and poet, Mohammad Muneem, the #wordsofalif can easily stand on their own. Mohammad teaches Urdu poetry in Symbiosis College of Arts of Commerce. ALIF formed in 2008. Alif is lyrical and poignant, relevant and bold. Yet when masterfully blended with Alif’s distinctive genre-defying contemporary and ethnic sound, the experience is nothing short of deliverance.
The band, Mohammad Muneem, Hardik Vaghela, Aman Moroney, Amit Gadgil, Karan Chitra Deshmukh, takes you on a seamless journey from Jhelumas’ chilling crescendo into the rhythmic beat of IRRA, award winner for Like a Sufi. From ballads such as the sentimental Main aur Tu to the more classical sound of Lalnawath, which won the Dada Saheb Phalke Film Festival’s 2018 Best Music Video”.
Alif is an experience that at once, both stirs and stills the soul. And ultimately, sets you free. The first letter of the Arabic Urdu script, Alif, also signifies oneness, mystic and unseen-- interpretations the band brings forth in their poetry and sound.
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