| 30 May 2006 | All day | CRASSH | |
- Description
Description
Tuesday 30 May 2006 at 5.00pm
CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1RX
Rukmini Bhaya Nair will read from Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems.
Meet the poet over wine and refreshments afterwards.
All are welcome.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Professor of Linguistics and English at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1982 and has since taught at universities around the world from Singapore to Stanford. This year, 2006, she was awarded a second honoris causa doctorate by the University of Antwerp for her synthesizing work in linguistics. Her critical books include Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture (2003, Oxford University Press and Routledge), Lying on the Postcolonial Couch (2002, Oxford University Press and Minnesota University Press), Translation, Text and Theory (2002, ed. Sage) and Technobrat: Culture in a Cybernetic Classroom (Harper Collins, 1997).
Nair, often described as 'India's first post-modern poet' and a feminist, has published three volumes of poetry, The Hyoid Bone, The Ayodhya Cantos and Yellow Hibiscus, all with Penguin. Her work has been translated into languages ranging from Swedish, German and Macedonian to Bangla, Hindi and Tamil, and her poems have appeared in Fulcrum: Special Issue on Indian Poetry(2005), in Poetry International (2004), in Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (2002), in the anthology Mosaic, featuring award-winning writers from the U.K and India (1999), and in Penguin New Writing in India (1992).
From the time she won, as a student, a prize for her essay at the First International Exhibition on Man & his Environment, Torino, Nair has received several awards for her writing. In 1990, for example, she received the first prize in the All India Poetry Society/ British Council competition, and in 2002, she was selected a 'Face of the Millennium' in a nationwide survey of writers. Her own position has always been that she writes poetry for the same reason that she does research in cognitive linguistics – to try and discover the limits of language. Married, with two children, Nair lives in Delhi. Her great ambition is simply to continue to write and research, whatever the genre and whatever the odds.
