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Your basketAmarjit Chandan India/UK
Amarjit Chandan (b. 1946, Nairobi) has published eight collections of poetry and five books of essays in Punjabi and his poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines world-wide. He has edited and translated into Punjabi about thirty anthologies of Indian and world poetry and fiction by, among others, Brecht, Neruda, Ritsos, Hikmet, Cardenal, Martin Carter and John Berger.
His poetry has been published in Arabic, Assamese, Bengali, Brazilian-Portuguese, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Marathi, Romanian, Slovenian, Telugu, Turkish and Urdu.
Chandan was one of the ten British poets selected by Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, for the National Poetry Day in 2001. He has participated in the Alderburgh, Ledbury, King's Lynn, Winchester poetry festivals and Poetry Parnassus in London in 2012. He represented the Punjab/UK in the International Literary Festival, Didim, Turkey in July 2006, Ljubljana (Slovenia) international poetry festival in 2015, and Al-Marbed International Poetry Festival Basra Iraq in February 2017. His poems have been variously anthologised and broadcast - notably in All That Mighty Heart: London Poems, Edited by Lisa Rus Spaar, University of Virginia Press, 2008.
He has received numerous literary awards for his work, including the Life-time Achievement Award by the Language Department of the Punjab Government, India in 2004; the Life-time Achievement Award by the Panjabis in Britain All-Party Parliamentary Group, London in 2006; and the Life-time Achievement Award by the Anãd Foundation New Delhi in November 2009.
His short poem carved in 40-foot long stone, both in Punjabi and its English version, is installed in a public square in Slough England. His poems have been set to music and sung by Madan Gopal Singh, Arieb Azhar, Mrityuanjay Awasthy, Ali Aftab Saeed et al. Award winning filmmaker Gurvinder Singh made a 45-min film on him titled Awãzãn (Voices) in 2017. He was Poet in Residence in the University of California at Santa Barbara (January-June 2014). He is a trustee of Modern Poetry in Translation (founded by Ted Hughes).
(2017)