Ulrike Draesner and Kiran Nagarkar at Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest (17-19 November)
As megacities that attract millions of diverse populations, Berlin, London & Mumbai are hotbeds of creativity. Languages jostle with aspirations, while people, ideas and imaginations manoeuvre around and with each other. How do writers understand a "city"? How do we use a place in writing? How do we construct a home? Drawing links between art and the creative city, novelist, poet and essayist Dr Ulrike Draesner and novelist, playwright and screenplay writer Kiran Nagarkar discuss how these cities have inspired them to create new narratives.
Profiles:
Ulrike Draesner was born in 1962 in Munich and has been living in Berlin since 1996. She is a poet, a writer of long and short fiction and cultural essays. Apart from numerous appearances in anthologies and magazines, she has published five major poetry collections, five novels, two of which were nominated for the German Book Prize, three collections of stories and two collections of essays. Draesner’s multimedia collaborations include videos, operas and space poems. She has been awarded poetic readerships at German and International Universities and received numerous literary prizes, most recently the Nicolas-Born Prize for Literature 2016. Her novel Seven Springs develops a chorus of voices telling about the consequences of forced migration in Middle and Eastern Europe from 1939 up to today. Draesner lives at Oxford as poet in residence until autumn 2017.
Kiran Nagarkar (born 1942) is an Indian novelist, playwright, film and drama critic and screenwriter both in Marathi and English, and is one of the most significant writers of postcolonial India. Amongst his most known works are Saat Sakkam Trechalis (Seven Sixes Are Forty Three) (1974), Ravan and Eddie (1994), and the epic novel, Cuckold (1997) for which he was awarded the 2001 Sahitya Akademi Award in English by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters. Nagarkar’s novel, The Extras, which is a sequel to Ravan and Eddie and traces the adult lives of the two as extras in Bollywood, was released in late Jan 2012. Completing the trilogy, Kiran Nagarkar released ‘Rest in Peace : Ravan & Eddie’ in 2015. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award at Tatat Lit Live! Festival in 2015. His book “Bedtime Story” was published in 2016 and a new novel titled “Jasoda” is underway.
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