The edition of the Yearbook for 2023 (published in 2024) has a special essay by Bibu Padhi in celebration of the centenary year of the father of modern Indian poetry in English, Nissim Ezekiel.
And, as with every issue of the Yearbook, here are the best poems selected from among those that were chosen for publication by anthologists and literary editors, and appeared during the year in question.
The 2023 edition includes work by: – Abhishek Anicca, – Aditi Garg, – Aftab Yusuf Shaikh, – Ajay Kumar, – Akshada Shrotiya, – Amit Shankar Saha, – Amlanjyoti Goswami, – Anannya Nath, – Anil Petwal, – Anju Kishore, – Anushri Nanavati, – Arjun Rajendran, – Arun Paria, – Athira Unni, – Atreyee Majumder, – Babitha Marina Justin, – Barnali Ray Shukla, – Basudhara Roy, – Beni Sumer Yanthan, – Bhaswati Ghosh, – Binu Karunakaran, – Carol D’Souza, – Chaitali Sengupta, – C.P. Surendran, – Debmalya, – Deepa Agarwal, – Devashish Makhija, – Dipanjali Roy, – Durga Prasad Panda, – Feby Joseph, – Gauri Awasthi, – Gayatri Lakhiani Chawla, – Geetha Ravichandran, – Gopal Lahiri, – Gopikrishnan Kottoor, – Huzaifa Pandit, – Imtiaz Dharker, – Inam Hussain Begg Mullick, – Indu Parvathi, – Irwin Allan Sealy, – Jim Wungramyao Kasom, – Johannes Manjrekar, – Jonaki Ray, – Jyotirmoy Sil, – K. Srilata, – Kabir Deb, – Kandala Singh, – Kashiana Singh, – Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca, – Kinjal Sethia, – Kinshuk Gupta, – Kiriti Sengupta, – Lakshmi Kannan, – Lina Krishnan, – Madhu Raghavendra, – Malashri Lal, – Mamang Dai, – Mandakini Bhattacherya, – Mani Rao, – Meena Chopra, – Meenakshi Mohan, – Menka Shivdasani, – Mrinalini Harchandrai, – Mugdha Sinha, – Mustansir Dalvi, – N. Sehar, – Namrata Pathak, – Namratha Varadharajan, – Neha R. Krishna, – Nikita Parik, – Nishi Chawla, – Oindri Sengupta, – Pervin Saket, – Prabhu S. Guptara, – Pramila Venkateswaran, – Priya Sarukkai Chabria, – Priyanka Sacheti, – R. Suresh Babu, – Radha Chakravarty, – Rahana K. Ismail, – Ramesh Karthik Nayak, – Ranjit Hoskote, – Ranu Uniyal, – Reshma Ruia, – Rhitama Basak, – Rishi Dastidar, – Rochelle Potkar, – Ruth Vanita, – Sahana Ahmed, – Saima Afreen, – Sambhu R., – Sangita Kalarickal, – Sanjeev Sethi, – Sanjukta Das Gupta, – Sarabjeet Garcha, – Saranya Subramanian, – Saraswati Nagpal, – Sekhar Banerjee, – Shanta Acharya, – Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, – Shaurya Pathania, – Shelly Bhoil, – Shikha Malaviya, – Shikhandin, – Shilpa Dikshit Thapliyal, – Shobhana Kumar, – Shruti Sareen, – Shyamasri Maji, – Siddharth Dasgupta, – Sivakami Velliangiri, – Soni Somarajan, – Sonnet Mondal, – Sophia Naz, – Suchi Govindarajan, – Sudeep Sen, – Suhit Bombaywala, – Sunil Rajagopal, – Sunil Sharma, – Tabish Nawaz, – Tansy Troy, – Taseer Gujral, – Tasneem Khan, – Tejaswinee Roychowdhury, – Teji Sethi, – Uma Gowrishankar, – Urna Bose, – Vidya Shankar, – Vivek Sharma, – Yamini Dand Shah, – Yuyutsu Sharma, – Zainab Wahab, and – Zilka Joseph.
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Founded and Edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar & Vinita Agrawal, the Yearbook is now published by Pippa Rann Books (an imprint of Salt Desert Media Group Ltd., U.K.); earlier issues were published by Hawakal.
Each issue of the annual Yearbook carries a selection of the work published in anthologies and magazines in the relevant year by poets of Indian origin, wherever in the world they happen to live.
Sukrita Paul Kumar is a multi-award-winning poet, scholar, critic, and author. A former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and holder of the Aruna Asaf Ali Chair at Delhi University, she is series co-editor of the “Writer in Context” series published by Routledge UK and South Asia, and the Guest Editor of Indian Literature, the journal of the Sahitya Akademi (Indian Academy of Letters). Vinita Agrawal has authored five books of poetry, and won the Jayanta Mahapatra National Award for Literature 2024 – and, earlier, the Proverse prize, the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize and the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence. She is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize, Co-chair for the Global Council for Excellence for Environment and Sustainability, and one of the twenty poets to be featured in a Taiwanese documentary on Asian poets, Deepest Uprising.
“I applaud you (the Editors) for putting together the Yearbook… to celebrate all the ways that poetry has been written and celebrated in English over the last year” – Christopher Merrill, Director of the Iowa Writing Program, Iowa, USA
“Marvellous endeavour. I’ve been struck by the diversity of the poems and the locations of the poets. The Yearbook sits very well in the larger family of anthologies. It also makes up for a certain deficit that you have with periodic anthologies that might appear once in ten years. This is a good way of mapping and addressing the (poetry) scene as vibrant as it is, through a series of yearbooks benchmarking the scene of anglophone poetry in India” – Ranjit Hoskote, poet and art curator, Mumbai.
“A barometer of the poetry climate, the political climate of the nation. It is a very important record of what is being written and thought of by poets. Clearly the Yearbook (stems) from a deeply felt need. This was missing from the poetry scene. A valuable archive for students, readers and editors who would like to have some reference material of the poetry being written by Indians” – Sampurna Chattarji, writer, editor and translator.
“Editing a poetry yearbook in India is a Himalayan task considering its huge scope and cultural diversity.… a marathon venture made possible by the editors’ commendable spirit for inclusivity and commitment to poetry.” – Jaydeep Sarangi, poet; anthologist; Principal, New Alipore College, Kolkata; and President of the Guild of Indian English Writers, Editors and Critics.
An interview with the Editors for the 2023 edition, was published for the World Poetry Day by The Hindu newspaper (Chennai, India) on March the 21st, 2024: www.thehindu.com/books/world-poetry-day-interview-poet-editors-sukrita-paul-kumar-and-vinita-agrawal-yearbook-of-indian-poetry-in-english-2023/article67975332.ece
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