KOCHI:Prominent writers from the North East and beyond will participate in South India Writers Ensemble (SIWE) from Friday organised by the People for Performing Arts and More (PAMPA) at Chengannur. Tamil writer Ambai will inaugurate the three-day festival supported by Kerala State Youth Welfare Board at 3 pm in the presence of famous writers.
“SIWE aims to bring together writers across languages and cultural backgrounds and enable cross-border networking and communication since 2013. Every year, SIWE concentrates on a specific region of the country to understand and promote the unique culture of the region. This year, emphasis has been given to the literature of the North East. Major writers from the states of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Manipur and Nagaland will participate in the festival,” said writer T P Rajeevan.
SIWE aims at creating a platform to introduce authors and literary works from Indian national languages and English to readers in Kerala and to introduce Malayalam literature to authors from other languages.
“The festival will include sessions such as panel discussions, readings and so on where an array of authors such as Arundathi Subramaniam, Salma, Hemant Divate, Robin S Ngangom, Rehmath Tarikere, Pankaj Dubey, Benyamin, Kalpetta Narayanan, Tulasi Venugopal, Mitra Venkatraj, Anjali Purohit, B Rajeevan, Apurba Saikia, Manjiri Prabhu, Arathi Hamphy, Ananya S Guha, Streamlet D Khar, Vani Mahesh, Preethi Shenoy, Yuan Chandrasekhar and many others will participate. The festival will also include a writers workshop conducted by American novelist, George Bishop,” said Said Shinie Antony, writer and programme coordinator of SIWE-2015. Another feature of the festival are cultural shows showcasing different theatrical forms of Kerala and film screenings. As part of the festival, a book containing English translations of all the works discussed in the festival will be published.
According to Kanaka Hama, Kannada poet-writer, who is part of PAMPA, SIWE is a significant undertaking to help change the trend of holding literary and cultural festivals in big cities and take it to smaller towns so that people living in the peripheries of urban centres get exposed to rich celebrations of art and culture.