[Reader-list] Performance from Universal Beach

[Vivek Narayanan]

Dear Friends,

I will be performing poems from my first book (Universal Beach, published by Harbour Line, 2006) as well as a selection of new poems written towards the second book (tentatively titled Lectures in Indian History) at:

 *the British Council, Chennai, Thursday 26 October, at 7.30 p.m.*  

This will be part of the Chennai British Council’s “Writer’s Block” season, where one writer is featured each month.  Please note that passes are not required for this event, and that all are welcome.

Do come!  Upcoming readings include Bangalore, Crosswords Bookstore, on November 9, and at the British Council Delhi on November 29.  Below, find blurbs, reviews, bio.

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'Soon the world will know of a daring, vigorous, sexy, humane, wise and traveled poet.  It will find in Universal Beach a remarkable formal control, and an equally remarkable free-verse nonchalance.  Narayanan has a noise all his own; a voice, happily, exceeding the limitations of voice.'  
--David Herd

"What is more interesting is the way Narayanan performed... [He] doesn't just recite his poems, he acts them out, complete with strong vocal inflexions, chanting and hand gestures."
--Jai Arjun Singh, Business Standard Weekend, Jabberwock blog.

“Vivek Narayanan’s poems remind me of a thriving port-city, where diverse tongues are spoken, their registers varying from a priestly classical to a piratical demotic… And then there are moments of luminosity, when the word becomes the bearer of hope and redemption.  Not by offering us a spurious clarity, but by challenging us into insight with a jaggedness of phrase, a treacherously ambiguous grammar, and a demanding musicality.
--Ranjit Hoskote

Vivek Narayanan’s first book of poems, Universal Beach, was published in 2006 from Harbour Line (Mumbai).  In 2002, he was the Charles Wallace Writer-In-Residence at the University of Kent at Canterbury. As a poet, he has studied under Derek Walcott and Rosanna Warren (at Boston University) and Charles Tomlinson.  He has recently had poems in Harvard Review, Fulcrum, Indian Literature and elsewhere, has been published in Indian and international journals and anthologies since 1994, including in Reasons For Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (Viking Penguin, 2002). His short stories, reviews and essays have appeared in a number of places, including the Village Voice, The HarperCollins Book of New Indian Fiction (2005), Best New American Voices 2005 (Harcourt Publishers), Poetry Review (UK), The Hindu, and Perihelion.  Upcoming work includes poems in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Voices from the Eastern World (W.W. Norton, 2007) and Sixty Indian Poets (Penguin).  In addition to publication, he has been working on the performance of his work since 1995.  

Narayanan was born in Ranchi in 1972, grew up in Lusaka, Zambia, studied in the US, and is currently based in Delhi, where he works at Sarai: The New Media Initiative ( www.sarai.net )— an organization that brings together visual artists, social scientists, writers, and others to reflect on old and new media forms and the city.  Currently he is also a staff writer for the quirky British “non-literary literary magazine”, The Enthusiast ( www.theenthusiast.co.uk ) and Associate Editor at the Boston-based international poetry annual, Fulcrum: www.fulcrumpoetry.org .