New Passages to India: Book Festival Celebrates Cultural Exchange

This week, as part of a special, year-long project commemorating the 70^th anniversary of Indian independence and partition, novelist Abir Mukherjee and poet Nalini Paul have travelled to Kolkata to work with two India-based authors, poet Sampurna Chattarji and novelist and journalist Sandip Roy. 

This trip forms the second stage of New Passages, a creative exchange project set up by the Book Festival in partnership with Purvai, Stornoway’s An Lanntair festival of South Asian arts and culture, and follows an initital writing residency on the Isle of Lewis in August 2017. The authors have been asked to creatively respond to items from the Mackenzie Collection, a rich and renowned collection of Asian art collected by Stornoway-born Colonel Colin Mackenzie during his time in India as its first surveyor general.

While in India, the authors will be appearing at the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival on Sunday 14 January to share their initial work and impressions. August 2018 will then see them return to Charlotte Square Gardens to present their finished works and discuss their experiences of the exchange as a whole.

The projects forms part of the Book Festival’s Booked! programme of events and you can read more about the project on our Booked! blog.

This partnership is supported by the British Council and, as part of the Book Festival’s Booked! programme, by players of the People’s Postcode Lottery.