The
Comica Festival, in association with the
South Asian Literature Festival, is to host an event with Indian artist
Amruta Patil in London at the end of September.
A writer and painter with an MFA from the
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Amruta has become India’s first
female graphic novelist and an internationally acclaimed author and
artist. On Friday September 28th, she will engage
in a Comica Conversation with the award-winning novelist
Neel Mukherjee at Foyles Bookshop on Charing Cross Road.
They will discuss her debut,
Kari, a powerful queer coming-of-age graphic novel about lost love,
subsequent survival and lesbian friendship between Kari and the dying
Angel. In his review, Neel extolled the book as “...worth reading for
this exquisitely witty and crackling friendship alone. In three
unsentimental pages Patil sketches out Angel’s death; I could barely
keep my hands from shaking after reading those three immensely vast,
restrained, even austere pages.”
Neel also praised Amruta’s writing as
“...a thing of radiant beauty: witty, smart and swaggering, brightly
knowing without ever falling into archness, illuminated by frequent
flashes of poetry.”
Amruta and Neel will also discuss her much-anticipated new graphic novel entitled
Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean. The first in a trilogy, this tells a tale drawn from the opening chapter of the
Mahabharat,
one of the greatest epics from India. With her evocative illustrations,
Amruta relates this story through the recollections of some of the main
characters. She has experimented with the story by choosing three
relatively quiet protagonists, using them as ‘sutradhars’, or
storytellers, for different parts of the tale, with a backdrop that
sprawls across heaven and earth.
The cast includes gods, demigods,
queens, sages, seers, seductresses, hermits, kings, warriors, and
navigators of the multiverse. Amruta will be speaking with Neel about
the process of adapting the great Epic into graphic novel form, and what
readers can expect as her trilogy unfolds.
The conversation will be introduced and hosted by
Paul Gravett, co-director of Comica Festival. Following the conversation, Amruta will be signing copies of
Kari and a limited supply of advance copies of
Adi Parva (published in October by Harper Collins).
Neel Mukherjee’s award-winning debut novel,
A Life Apart was published in 2010. His second novel,
The Lives of Others, is out in January 2014. He reviews fiction and graphic novels regularly for
The Times and is also a contributing editor for
Boston Review, where he starts a column from the beginning of next year.
• You can read Neel Mukherjee’s complete review of Kari here, and read Paul Gravett’s profile of and interview with Amruta Patil here.
• Comica Conversation: Visions of India, 6.30-7.30pm, in the Third Floor
Gallery at Foyles Bookshop,
113-119 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0EB
• More info on the Comic Festival web site
No comments:
Post a Comment