Southeast Asia focus in November lit fest A STAFF REPORTER Rita Chowdhury administers the oath during the function on Sunday. Picture by UB Photos Jan. 29: Come November and the city will host an international literary festival where prominent literary personalities from across the country and the world will participate. The festival will be organised by Adharxila, a forum set up by popular Assamese novelist Rita Chowdhury, with an aim to give an opportunity to the writers of the Northeast to interact and exchange ideas with writers of other countries. Chowdhury today said most of the litterateurs for the festival would be invited from the Southeast Asian countries. “Most litterateurs from Southeast Asian countries will be invited. Interactive sessions and art workshops will be organised during the festival. It will give an opportunity to the writers of Northeast for whom visiting different countries is not always possible,” she said. Chowdhury, the author of popular novels like Makam and Deo Langkhui, floated the forum on July 24 last year to work for Assamese literature. Today, altogether 61 new members took oath at a function organised at their office in Nijarapar. Adharxila started a project to encourage promising Assamese authors. As part of the project, it selected six promising writers — Anurag Mahanta, Geetali Bora, Juri Borah Borgohain, Pankaj Gobinda Medhi, Manalisha Saikia and Abhijit Saikia — in its first batch. Chowdhury said the six novels of the first batch of writers would be released by November. Today, the forum requested young writers (under the age of 35 years) of the state to send manuscripts of their unpublished novels, short stories, poems and articles so that it can give them proper guidance. “We want Assamese literature to deal with more serious issues,” Chowdhury said. “We request young writers to send manuscripts of their unpublished novels (or at least the first three chapters), short stories, articles and poems so that we can offer guidance to them,” she said. She added that 36 young writers would be covered under the project this year and they would be given training regarding the basics of writing fiction and non-fiction in workshops. Chowdhury said Adharxila was also working to collect and preserve the history of different indigenous communities and prominent places of the state. She appealed to the people to send documents related to the histories of different communities and places to them. She said they would use audio-visual media to preserve them, if required. The Sahitya Akademi Award winning-writer said the forum would also work for the trauma-affected people of the state. “There are thousands of trauma-affected people, a product of decades-long violence, who need proper attention,” she said.
(The Telegraph,30.01.2012) _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
