Bengaluru Poetry Festival to introduce rap, bilingual poetry this year

Started in 2016, the festival is all set to enter its fourth edition and will also feature rap music as form of contemporary poetry.
Sangeeta Abhay with her sculpture that will be on display at the fest.
Sangeeta Abhay with her sculpture that will be on display at the fest.

BENGALURU: The coming weekend has a sweet treat in store for poetry lovers in the city. The Bengaluru Poetry Festival, presented by Atta Galata, is back in town with a new experience.

Started in 2016, the festival is all set to enter its fourth edition and will also feature rap music as form of contemporary poetry.

Last year, over 5,000 poetry lovers had attended the festival, and the past few editions attracted various recognised poets, such as Javed Akhtar and Piyush Mishra.

Irshad Kamil
Irshad Kamil

This year, the festival will feature 70 speakers, with performances from the likes of TM Krishna, Irshad Kamil, Ricke Scheffler, Manoj Muntasir and Raj Shekar, to name a few. Festival director Shinie Antony said, “We make sure to add a new element with every edition.

This year, we have added rap poetry, with Siddhanth Chaturvedi (Gully Boy’s MC Sher) among the performers. We also have Andrea Jeremiah bringing out her first book on poetry.”

Another new addition is a session on poetry in different languages. Called Baasha, the session aims to portray works by bilingual poets for the first time and will feature poetry in Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi and even German.

This year, the festival will also introduce a new programme, 'Duets', which will see a combined reading by two poets on prefixed themes.

“We have Arundhati Subramanium (author) and Ranjit Hoskote (poet) who are going to perform in a alternate style for the poem Love In Unreal Times. We have curated many of these small collaborations in order to depict a diverse number of acts,” said Antony.

Bengalureans will also get a chance to see an exclusive sculpture by Sangeeta Abhay, created using 108 scrap keyboards with the keyboards representing eight quotes by the Buddha.

Besides this, workshops for children and adults will also be organised during the festival. The Bengaluru Poetry Festival will be held on July 20-21 at Taj West End from 10 am to 8 pm.

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