Meena Kandasamy & Mamta Sagar in Aberystwyth
Literature Across Frontiers is bringing two of India’s most exciting and outspoken poets to Aberystwyth. Meena Kandasamy is a poet, writer, activist and translator whose work maintains a focus on caste annihilation, linguistic identity and feminism. Mamta Sagar is an Indian poet and playwright writing in Kannada. The poets will be hosted by the Centre for Cultural Translation at Aberystwyth University and will take part in two events:
New poetry from India: Meena Kandasamy and Mamta Sagar with Eurig Salisbury and Hywel Griffiths
Waterstones, Aberystwyth, June 24, 18:00 – 19.30, Free
Indian poets Meena Kandasamy and Mamta Sagar join Welsh poets Eurig Salisbury and Hywel Griffiths for a reading at Waterstones bookshop. With Poetry Wales.
Seminar: Poetry, Politics and Cultural Translation
Canolfan Ymchwil Cyfieithu Diwylliannol / Research Centre for Cultural Translation
25 June 2015, 14:00 – 16:00 
All are welcome for this seminar on Poetry, Politics and Cultural Translation. Dr Meena Kandasamy (pictured right) discusses ‘Translation and the taboo of sex in the case of the Thirukkural’ and Dr Mamta Sagar ‘Translating poetry and politics beyond linguistic spaces’.
This events are supported by Wales Arts International, Poetry Wales and Literature Across Frontiers.
The Research Centre for Cultural Translation is part of the Institute of Literature Languages and Creative Arts, which includes the academic departments of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Welsh, English and Creative Writing, European Languages and the School of Art.
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Mamta Sagar is an Indian poet and playwright writing in Kannada. She has published four collections of poetry, including her selected poems in English translation Hide and Seek (2014), four plays, an anthology of columns, a collection of essays in Kannada and English. She participated in numerous international poetry festivals in India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Colombia, Cuba, South Africa, Nicaragua, Slovenia, Serbia and Macedonia. Her poems are translated into several Indian and foreign languages including Sinhalese, Vietnamese, Galician, Maltese, Spanish, Slovenian, Serbian, Macedonian, Chinese, Japanese. Mamta Sagar has collaborated and performed in ‘Motherland’, with artists N.Pushpamala (India), ‘Emily Dickenson project’ with Jannet and Jennifer (Australia), with poets Marjorie Evasco (Philippines) and Que Mai (Vietnam) and musicians Manja Ristic, Igor Stangliczky and Marko Jevtić (Belgrade). She has conducted poetry workshops for schools in Durban, South Africa (2005) and at the Rangashankara Theatre festival 2007, Bangalore and a theatre workshop for young girls from economically deprived communities in Hyderabad.
Meena Kandasamy (1984) is a poet, writer, activist and translator. Her work maintains a focus on caste annihilation, linguistic identity and feminism. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010). Her critically acclaimed first novel The Gypsy Goddess was published by Atlantic Books (UK) and HarperCollins India in 2014. She was a British Council – Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent and a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University in 2011. In 2009, she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP). She has held writing residencies at the Hong Kong Baptist University, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and the University of Hyderabad. She has co-authored (with M Nisar) a biography of Kerala’s foremost Dalit revolutionary Ayyankali, and previously, she edited The Dalit, a bi-monthly English magazine. She holds a PhD in socio-linguistics from Anna University Chennai. www.meenakandasamy.com
Hywel Griffiths is a lecturer in physical geography at the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University. He has published two poetry collections, Banerog and Teigr yn y Gegin (for children) and was the crowned poet in the 2008 National Eisteddfod.
Eurig Salisbury won the Chair competition at the 2006 Urdd Eisteddfod in Denbighshire and is a research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth, where he is currently working on the Guto’r Glyn Project. He was Barrd Plant Cymru from 2011 – 2013. Llyfr Glas Eurig , his first collection of poems, was published by Barddas in 2008.