Priya Sarukkai Chabria (born 1955) is an Indian poet, translator, and novelist who writes in English.[1] She was awarded for her contributions by the Indian government.
She has also written a 're-visioning' of Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore. This work, as per Sarukkai Chabria's interview in the Hindustan Times "retained the ideas and feelings of the original but pared and updated the language while arranging the words more freely on the page".
She is a member of the Advisory Council of G100 and Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange, Australia.
Her poems have been translated into several languages, Indian and European.
Chabria is working on a memoir based on her recollections of her family accessed through a series of photographs reconstructed in words. She writes of having lost access to the photos after the demise of her mother in 2013. In her memoir, she is writing about them in order to "re-construct my past and familial connections in the best way I know: through words". The goal is to "reclaim my childhood and teenage years, re-establish relationships with elders... and revalidate my existence as a loved member of a family".
For Sahapedia, an open encyclopedic resource connected with "the arts, culture and history of India", Sarukkai Chabria curated and contributed to a module of various essays exploring, with contemporary eyes, the "layered heritage" of the Rasa theory and its significance: 'Rapture, Rasa and its Re-enactments in Subcontinental Aesthetics: Narratives of Practice.
50 Poems, 50 Poets. Open Space. 2004.
As contributing editor
Divining Dante. Australia: Recent Work Press. 2021. ISBN9780645009057.
As contributor to anthologies
A partial list:
Dialogues and Other Poems. Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. 2005. ISBN9798126019914.
Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World
Adelphiana
Asymptote
Drunken Boat
PEN International
Post Road
Reliquiae
The Literary Review
The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction
The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry
The British Journal of Literary Translation
Language for a New Century
Voyages of Body and Soul
As contributor to speculative fiction anthologies
Blanket, Relatively True: Stories of Truth, Deception, Post-Truth From the Indian Subcontinent and Australia, Eds. Meenakshi Bharat & Sharon Rundle, Orient Black Swan, Hyderabad, 2022
Cockaigne A Reappraisal (Draft) by Dr. Indumati Jones, Kitaab Anthology, Singapore, 2023
Dreaming Of The Cool Green River, New Horizons: The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, Ed. Tarun K Saint, Gollancz, London, 2019
Flyby, Solarpunk Creatures: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, World Weavers Press, New Mexico, 2023
Fragments from the Book of Beauty, Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by The Ramayan, Ed. Anil Menon & Vandana Singh, Zubaan, New Delhi, 2012
I Had A Dream, Ecoceanic: Global South Science Fiction, Eds. Tarun K Saint & Francesco Verso, Future Fiction, Roma, 2023
Kairos, No News 90 Poets Reflect on a Unique BBC Newscast, Ed. Paul Munden, Alvin Pang & Shane Strange, Recent Work Press, Canberra, 2020
Listen: A Memoir, Multispecies Cities Solarpunk Urban Futures, Eds. Christoph Ruppretch, Deborah Cleland, Norie Tamura, Rajat Chaudhuri and Sarena Ulibarri, World Weaver Press, New Mexico, 2021
Manikkavachakar’s Space Odyssey, Divining Dante, Eds. Paul Munden & Nessa O’Mahony, Recent Work Press, Canberra, 2021
In New Asian Writing, poet, translator and editor Aryanil Mukerjee described Sarukkai Chabria's Calling Over Water as "postmodern travel poetry" and a "poetic exercise of intertextuality rare to be found in Anglophone Indian poetry". In The Wire, writer, critic and academic Uttaran Das Gupta said Calling Over Water continued Sarukkai Chabria's "cross-genre explorations" and penchant for "elaborate references, experiments with form, and dauntless exploration of emotions".
Poet George Szirtes, T.S. Eliot Memorial Poetry Prize awardee for 2004, described Not Springtime Yet as ’The poems are passionate, sensuous and intelligent, full of energy and enterprise. They hold their dramatic shapes with grace and establish her as a poet to read and return to time and again'.
In The Indian Express, TM Krishna, Carnatic vocalist, writer, activist and Ramon Magsaysay awardee, said, "She uses the play of image, experience and thought (that Andal miraculously bundles into a word or two) to excavate Andal. She enters her source through the membrane of Andal’s imagination, only to subsume herself within it." Krishna summed up, "Her nuanced interpretations give Andal a present aesthetic reality".
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