Nov 27 2025 to Nov 27 2025 6:30 p.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Arundhathi Subramaniam’s new poems map a wobbling world, trying to find its axis in a season of change. Fabrics tear, lands splinter, stances harden, loved ones die, names dissolve. But wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women—women who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant, and sometimes upside down. Blurring the divide between the mundane and the magical, the historical and the imaginary, they point to a new world that might lie within the folds of the old. A world that requires a new set of skills: how to find the right nicknames, how to ‘gatecrash into the present’, how to ‘go skinny-dipping in the self’. These are songs of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom.

This session with poet Arundhathi Subramaniam, interspersed with poetry readings, will trace the journey of her recent trilogy on the theme of the sacred and the feminine – a journey that reaches its culmination with this new collection of poems celebrating women and upside-downness. She will be in conversation with author, Shinie Antony.

A Q&A session will follow.

Speakers

Arundhathi Subramaniam
Author
Described as ‘one of the finest poets writing in India today’ (Keki Daruwalla, The Hindu, 2010), Arundhathi Subramaniam is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose. Her recent books include the Penguin anthology of female mystic poetry, Wild Women, and the prose work, Women Who Wear Only Themselves. Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry 2015, her awards include the Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry 2020, the Il Ceppo Prize in Italy, the Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia Award, among several others. She has worked as critic, curator and poetry editor over the years, and divides her time between New York, Chennai and Mumbai.

Shinie Antony
Writer
Shinie Antony is the author of Eden Abandoned: The Story of Lilith, a novella that won the Wise Owl Prize for fiction 2025, was longlisted for AutHer Awards and has been translated into Bangla by The Antonym Collections. Her other novellas include The Girl Who Couldn’t Love and Can’t, longlisted for the Crossword Award. She has compiled the anthologies Hell Hath No Fury, Boo, Why We Don’t Talk, An Unsuitable Woman, and co-edited The Art of Holding On, Letting Go, where many authors come together to examine grief via objects left behind. Her first book was a collection of short stories, Barefoot and Pregnant, on dysfunctional motherhood; one of her stories, A Dog’s Death, won the Commonwealth Short Story Asia prize in 2002.

Antony grew up in Bombay, Delhi, Kochi and Kavaratti, and lives happily ever after in Bangalore.