Literature Across Frontiers awards its 2018 CWIT Fellowship in Creative Translation and Writing
The Charles Wallace India Trust offers opportunities to writers, translators and scholars from India to spend time in the UK working on a project of their choice. The fellowship launched by LAF in 2016 is the only one in Wales, and targets early career practitioners of literary translation and writing. Based in Aberystwyth, the 2018 fellowship will be hosted jointly with the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.
We are very pleased to award the 2018 Fellowship to Dr Maaz Bin Bilal, an academic, writer and translator who proposes to work ona project combining translation and writing of poetry. During his three months in Aberystwyth, he plans to complete his translation from Urdu of Fikr Taunsvi’s Chhata Darya(1948) or The Sixth River: A journal from the time of partition of India, to be published by Speaking Tiger Press, New Delhi, in 2019. He will also translate poetry written by the Mughal king, Aurangzeb in Braj, a dialect of Hindi.
Maaz Bin Bilal will be publishing his first collection of original poetry and translations Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu, with Yoda Press in 2019, and he plans to start a new cycle of poems while in Aberystwyth, focusing thematically on the divides opened up by recent waves of nationalism, both in India and in the UK.
The previous CWIT fellows in Aberystwyth were Venkateswar Ramaswamy and Mohini Gupta.
There are currently three other CWIT fellowships in the field of writing and translation, two in writing, based at the Universities of Stirling and Kent, and one in translation, based at the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
Photo: Sarang Sena