A Celebration of Wales and Welsh Culture

Cymru, the Welsh name for Wales, is a distinctive and rich part of the United Kingdom with one of the longest continuous literary traditions in Europe, that is yet to be fully discovered by many, especially in India.

The Welsh, being extremely proud of their heritage, have conscientiously revived and reinvented their traditional customs, especially those relating to language, poetry, literature and music. Now, they are here to bring some of their best literary and artistic minds to showcase the country’s fascinating heritage and cross-pollinate ideas with the finest local minds in our city.

NGMA Mumbai, Ministry of Culture, Government of India in association with Literature Across Frontiers, Wales Literature Exchange and Avid Learning present Cymru in the City.

Explore the rich and distinctive culture of Wales right here

About the festival - Cymru in the City

This micro-festival builds on a decade of Literature Across Frontiers’ cultural interaction with India and offers Mumbai audiences a delightful taste of the contemporary legacy of one of Europe’s oldest cultural traditions.

• The Festival will commence with an evening of readings by a select group of the finest Welsh and Indian authors at Kitab Khana, where they will be joined by two poets from Europe - three-times Wales Book of the Year winner, Caryl Lewis and, one of Ten New Voices from Europe, Llŷr Gwyn Lewis.
  

• This will be followed by two days of enlivened literary debates and multidisciplinary performances at the NGMA.

• Featuring leading Welsh authors, this festival will also showcase the innovative Invertigo Theatre Company with their show My Body Welsh, and Kathak-Cynghanedd – a dance and poetry performance exploring connections between two classical art forms.

• Attendees can also look forward to screenings of literature-related films from Wales at the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS).

About the Speakers

• Horatio Clare
  

A consummate traveller, memoirist and children’s author Horatio Clare has worked as a BBC radio producer of cultural programmes and is also a freelance essayist and reviewer. His first book, Running for the Hills (2006), a memoir of a childhood on a Welsh sheep farm, won him immediate acclaim. Among his numerous travel books, A Single Swallow traces the migration of swallows from South Africa to South Wales, while Icebreaker: A Voyage Far North is set on a Finnish icebreaker. His latest book is Something of His Art: Walking to Lubeck with J S Bach.

• Caryl Lewis
  

Award-winning author of eleven Welsh-language books for adults, three novels for young adults and thirteen children’s books, Caryl Lewis is a three-time winner of the Wales Book of the Year. Her latest, a collection of short stories dealing with nature, relationships, love and loss, Y Gwreiddyn (The Root), won the award in Welsh fiction category in 2017. Caryl Lewis has also written extensively for cinema and television, notably adapting for filming her own novel Martha, Jac and Sianco. Her TV credits include the Welsh scripts of the successful crime series Y Gwyll / Hinterland and Craith / Hidden.

• Llŷr Gwyn Lewis
  

Poet and prose writer Llŷr Gwyn Lewis is one of the most distinctive voices among the new generation of Welsh-language writers. His debut Rhyw Flodau Rhyfel (Some Flowers of War, 2014), won the Creative Non-Fiction category in the 2015 Wales Book of the Year award, and his first short story collection, Fabula, was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year award 2018. He is one of the Ten New Voices from Europe for 2017, a selection of emerging writers from around Europe made by Literature Across Frontiers and the Literary Europe Live network of European festivals.

• Robert Minhinnick
  

Prize-winning author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, three works of fiction, and four volumes of essays on the environment and today’s globalised world, Robert Minhinnick has been influential in changing the shape of the contemporary poetry scene in Wales and in forging an international context for Welsh poetry both as former editor of the magazine Poetry Wales and as translator. His most recent collection Diary of the Last Man (2018) was nominated for the TS Eliot prize and won him his third Wales Book of the Year award. He is also an environmental activist and co-founder of Sustainable Wales.

• Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones
  

Academic Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones has worked for over thirty years in higher education as researcher, lecturer and professor in the field of culture, media, language planning, sociolinguistics and creative translation. She is a member of the Council of Europe’s Expert Group on Media for the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages and is a Director of Mercator International where Literature Across Frontiers and Wales Literature Exchange are based. She serves on boards of several cultural organisations, including the National Eistedfodd festival. She speaks seven languages.

• Alexandra Büchler
  

Director of Literature Across Frontiers, Alexandra Büchler is also a translator and editor with over twenty publications to her credit. She has worked as a cultural manager for three decades, curating literary events and developing initiatives aimed at fostering literary exchange and translation within Europe, and between Europe and other global regions, notably India, where LAF has been working for a decade. Her most recent translation into English is the Czech modern classic The House of a Thousand Floors by Jan Weiss, published in 2016.

• Harkaitz Cano
  

The prominent Basque author Harkaitz Cano has published over thirty books of poetry, short stories and novels, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages, including Spanish, German, Polish and Russian. His novels A Blade of Light and Twist were published in English translation in 2010 and 2018 respectively. His latest novel to date is Fakirraren ahotsa (The Voice of the Fakir, 2018). He is also a scriptwriter and translator and has translated into Basque works by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Hanif Kureishi and Allen Ginsberg, among others.

• Nadia Mifsud
  

Maltese writer Nadia Mifsud has been living in France since 1998. She writes in Maltese language and is also a translator between her native tongue and French. Her second poetry collection, kantuniera ’l bogħod (Round the Bend, 2015), was awarded the 2016 National Book Prize. Her debut novel, Ir-rota daret dawra (kważi) sħiħa (Going (almost) full circle, 2017) was shortlisted for the 2018 National Book Prize. A member of the cultural NGO Inizjamed, she co-organises its Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival.

• Ranjit Hoskote
  

Poet, editor, art theorist and independent curator, Ranjit Hoskote has published collections of poetry including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), and, most recently, Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2018). His translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). Hoskote is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012), the first annotated critical edition of a major Anglophone Indian poet’s work.

• Hemant Divate
  

Marathi poet, editor, publisher and translator, Hemant Divate has published six poetry collections in Marathi. Divate’s poems have been translated into French, Italian, Slovak, Japanese, Persian, Maltese, Serbian, Slovenian, Greek, Hindi and many Indian languages. His publishing house, Paperwall Media & Publishing, has published, under its imprint Poetrywala, more than 100 poetry collections. Hemant lives and works in Mumbai.

• Sampurna Chattarji
  

Poet, prose writer, authors of books for children and translator from Bengali, Sampurna Chattarji has published sixteen books to date, including a short-story collection about Bombay/Mumbai, Dirty Love (Penguin, 2013), a translation of Joy Goswami’s Selected Poems (Harper Perennial, 2014, 2018), and seven poetry titles, the most recent being Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien (HarperCollins, 2015), Elsewhere Where Else / Lle Arall Ble Arall (Poetrywala, 2018), co-authored with Eurig Salisbury, and – in collaboration with the poet, Karthika Naïr, and the artist, Joëlle Jolivet – Over and Under Ground in Mumbai & Paris (Context, Westland Publications, 2018). She is currently Poetry Editor of The Indian Quarterly.

• Vinutha Mallya
  

Editor, publishing consultant and journalist, Vinutha Mallya is currently Features Assistant Editor with The Pune Mirror.

• Vikram Iyengar
  

Dancer, choreographer, theatre director, performing arts researcher, writer, arts manager and curator, based in Calcutta, Vikram Iyengar is the co-founder of the Kathak-based performance company Ranan and initiator of the Pickle Factory, a new venue for dance, movement practice and discourse. Vikram’s range of work in India and abroad spans productions and workshops with dancers and actors, performance collaborations, research and curation projects for several arts bodies. He was awarded several high-profile fellowships by bodies such as ARThink South Asia, International Society for the Performing Arts and the Australia Council for the Arts.

• Steffan Donnelly
  

Steffan Donnelly is an actor, writer, and Artistic Director of Invertigo Theatre Company. His work has been seen internationally. Theatre includes seasons at Shakespeare’s Globe, Journeying Boys (Barbican), Pilgrims (HighTide) for which he was nominated for an Off-West End Award for Best Male Performance. The screen includes The Innocents (Netflix), and the movies Bohemian Rhapsody and Darkest Hour.

• Jordan Mallory-Skinner
  

Jordan Mallory-Skinner is an interdisciplinary artist, working as a composer, sound designer and actor. He also composes for short films and creates sound-based installations in cymatics and interactive sound sculpture for exhibition spaces, including a recent installation at the Southbank Centre.

• Tara Robinson
  

Tara Robinson is a theatre-maker, director and writer. She is the artistic lead of The Conker Group whose work is rooted in a collaborative process with artists and non-artists, is playful in tone and responds to complex contemporary social issues. She has worked at Shakespeare’s Globe, The Gate, The West End (Michael Grandage Company), The Young Vic, HOME Manchester.

About the Partners

• Literature Across Frontiers (LAF)
  

With its motto Making Literature Travel, it aims to develop intercultural dialogue through literature and, translation and highlight less translated works of literature. Based in Wales (United Kingdom), LAF works in partnership with organisations and individuals across Europe and beyond fostering literary diversity and acting as a catalyst for new connections, collaborations and projects, conducting research, contributing to strategic policy debates and providing online resources and information on the international literary sector. In 2019, LAF celebrates its 10th anniversary of working to connect the literary scene of Wales, Europe and India.

• Wales Literature Exchange
  

Wales Literature Exchange is the national agency promoting the literature of Wales internationally and supporting its translation into other languages. Its motto, ‘Translating Wales, Reading the World’ captures its mission to facilitate international exchange with literary Wales.

• Wales Arts International
  

Wales Arts International fosters international artistic excellence in Wales and ensures international impact and recognition for the arts and culture of Wales. It provides advice and support to artists and arts organisations from Wales who work on an international level, and by being a contact point for international artists and arts organisations working in Wales. Wales Arts International works closely with the Welsh Government and is a partnership between Arts Council Wales and the British Council.

• Kitab Khana
  

Kitab Khana is a book lover’s delight, run by an exclusive team of bibliophiles that strives to ensure that every book on its shelves is hand-picked and well-curated. For connoisseurs of regional literature, Kitab Khana’s vast range of Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi books is an added delight.

• Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS)
  

A pan-India wildlife research organization, it has been promoting the cause of nature conservation since its inception in 1883 by eight amateur naturalists of Bombay. During its journey from an amateurs’ organization to a professional organization, the guiding principle of BNHS has been that conservation should be based on scientific research – a tradition exemplified by its former president, Dr Salim Ali, world-renowned ornithologist. Today, BNHS has a vibrant presence at dozens of places across India, covering diverse habitats such as forests, grasslands, wetlands, mountains, deserts and marine areas.

• The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai

It is a repository of the cultural ethos of the country and showcases the changing art forms through the passage of the last 160 years starting from about 1857 in the field of Visual and Plastic arts. The first NGMA was opened in New Delhi at the historic Jaipur House, in the presence of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and artists and art lovers on March 29, 1954. The National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai was opened to the public in 1996. It hosts various exhibitions and also has its own art collections comprising paintings, sculptures and graphics with a focus on Indian and International artists. It is located in the precinct of the former auditorium the Sir Cowasji Jehangir Public Hall and the Institute of Science. This architecturally marvellous building was designed and built by the famous British architect George Wittet which has been completely redesigned keeping only the facade edifice that was Public Hall. It has hosted eminent artists like K.H. Ara, F. N. Souza, Gaitonde, S.H. Raza and M.F. Hussain and contemporary artists like K.G. Subramanyam, Sudhir Patwardhan, Nalini Malini, Atul Dodiya and Sudarshan Shetty. The NGMA in Mumbai is run and administered as a subordinate office to the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, which has two branches one at Mumbai and the other at Bengaluru.

• Avid Learning
  

A public programming platform and cultural arm of the Essar Group, it has conducted over 1000 programs and connected with more than 125,000 individuals since its inception in 2009. Driven by the belief that Learning Never Stops, AVID’s multiple formats like Workshops, Panel Discussions, Gallery Walkthroughs, and Festival Platforms create a dynamic and interactive atmosphere that stimulates intellectual and creative growth across the fields of Culture & Heritage, Literature, Art and Innovation.