FAMOUS WRITERS

SHANTA SHELKE

Shanta Shelke was a noted Marathi writer, journalist, professor and poet. As a writer, her collections include – poems, children works, translations, stories, character sketches and many more. She was a song composer also and her songs were sung by great names like Lata Mangeshkar, Kishori Amonkar and Asha Bhosle. During her working career in Mumbai, she also served in Film Censor board, Theatre examination board and Govt. book award. She used to translate English movies for newspaper columns. She has worked as assistant editor of the weekly Navyug for 5 years.

Shanta was born on 19 Oct 1922 in Indapur, Pune. She was educated in Sir Parshurambhau College, Pune. Later she did post graduation in Sanskrit and Marathi and was the first rank holder of Mumbai University. She also won the Na. Chi. Kelkar and Chiplunkar awards during the same period. Then she worked as assistant editor of the weekly Navyug. After 5 years, she moved to Nagpur and worked as Marathi faculty in Hislop College. She retired after long service from Dayanand College, Mumbai and settled in Pune.

Her works in Marathi include - poems, stories, novels, character sketches, interviews, critiques and introductions. She used to translate English films for Marathi newspaper columns and a few of them have been later published as books. Ek pani, Madarangi and Janta Ajanata are a few such translation works. She also produced lalit literature like Anandache Jhad (The tree of happiness), Avad Nivad  (Likes dislikes), Vadildhari Manase (Father figures), Pavsaadhicha Paus (The rain before the rains), Sansmarane (memories) and Dhool Pati - an introspective autobiography.

Her published novels are Dharma, Odh, Chikkhaldrayancha Mantrik, Vijhti Jyot, Nararakshas, Punarjanma and Majha Khel Mandu De. Some of her famous song collections include Godaan, Varsha, Kalyanche divas fulanchya rati and Purvasandhya. She has never attempted playwrights and comedies.

Sandra Cisneros

Born on December 20, 1954, Cisnero grew up in Chicago, Illinois. Cisneros’ father developed a travelling proclivity and her family had to constantly move back and forth between Chicago and Mexico City. Due to constant travel they had to keep switching school and find new place to live every time. The instability in the family made six of Cisneros’ brothers to form a bond among themselves excluding their sister. The feeling of isolation aggravated as her father looked at his children as six sons and a daughter. In fact, the growing loneliness played a key role in developing her interest in writing. Her mother was the only one around her with an avid reading habit and social awareness and she made sure that her daughter would become an independent woman unlike herself.

Cisneros received her early education from a Catholic school Josephinum Academy. Here she polished her writing skills under a teacher’s supervision. She wrote poems on the Vietnam War when she was ten and won recognition for her work. According to herself, she truly began writing when she got enrolled in a creative writing course in college. In 1976, she graduated from Loyola University, Chicago and two years later she earned Master of Fine Arts degree from University of Iowa.

She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was struck by a sudden realization that she had an advantage over her fellow writers for her rich cultural heritage. Being a Mexican woman instead of making her an outsider gave her the benefit to write differently without conforming to literary style of American canon which her classmates adopted. Her cultural diversity became a model for her writing in which she shared her experiences living in the Puerto Rican neighborhood of Chicago.

In her novel The House on Mango Street she drew inspiration from Mexican and Southwestern popular culture. She tried to depict the lives of the people she could relate to. Her stories were drawn from real life conversation she had heard from the people, especially the ones who were trivialized. She even confessed to recording the conversation in writing she had with people which she would later adapt into her writings. Another aspect that contributes to her unique writings style is her bilingualism and biculturalism treasure. Being familiar with two cultures enriched her work as she employed an array of experiences, thoughts and feelings with the help of diction from two different languages.

The publication of Cisneros’s first novel earned her huge popularity and Writer-in-Residence posts at US universities. She taught at a number of universities which include University of California and University of Michigan. Subsequent to writing her first novel, she published a collection of stories, titled Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, in 1991. It contains 22 stories and incorporates a wide range of narrative techniques. Each story employs different narrative style such as, first-person and third-person and omniscient narration. Besides that the theme of her works often addressed construction of female identity and sexuality which was repressed during her time by the patriarch society.

Sandra Cisneros contributions to American literature include; My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987), Loose Woman: Poems (1984), Have You Seen Marie?(2012) and other notable works.

                                                                               
Kamala Surayya

Kamala Surayya, formerly known as Kamala Das was one of the leading writers of Malayalam. Her pen name is Madhavi Kutty. She was a major English poet as well as a leading novelist and short story writer of Malayalam. She is one among those lucky and rare writers of India who has been nominated and shortlisted for Nobel Prize for Literature and it happened in 1984. She was the most popular female writer of Malayalam during 20^th century famous for her works – Nashtapetta Neelambari, Neermathalam Pootha Kalam and Ente Kadha. Her short stories and novels are equally famous and she was one among those rarest gems who has a distinct finger print in Indian literature. She was equally famous in English as in Malayalam and was one among the most popular writers since 1960’s. Her English works has won many international awards of which Asian awards and Kent’s awards are most popular. She was born in a conservative Hindu Nair family. Later in 1999, she accepted Islam and changed her name to Kamala Surayya at the age of 65. Her conversion was rather controversial, among social and literary circles. But according to her personal opinion, she was secure behind the black veil.

Her popular Malayalam works are Pakshiyude Manam, Naricheerukal Parakkumbol, Neermathalam Pootha Kalam, Madhavikkuttiyude Unmakkadhakal, Vandikkalakal, Palayan, Balyakala Smaranakal, Varshangalkku Mumbu, Chandana Marangal, Neypayasam, Dayarikkurippukal and Chekkerunna Pakshikal.  Her major English works include The Sirens for which she Asian Poetry Prize in 1965 and Summer in Calcutta for which she won Kent's Award in the following year. Her other English works are Yaa Allah, Only the Soul Knows How to Sing, Tonight, The Descendants, This Savage Rite (with Pritish Nandy), My Mother At Sixty-six, My Grandmother House, Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories, The Anamalai Poems, Alphabet of Lust, My Story (autobiography) and The Old Playhouse and Other Poems.

Apart from being nominated for Nobel Prize, she has won many awards and designations as well. Kerala Sahitya Academy Award in 1969 for Thanuppu, Sahitya Academy Award – 1985, Honorary D.Litt by University of Calicut – 2006, Ezhuthachan Puraskaram – 2009, Muttathu Varkey Award – 2006 and above all Award of Asian PEN anthology – 1964.

Alexander Pushkin

                                                    

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin was a Russian Romantic author who is considered to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems and plays, creating a style of storytelling—mixing drama, romance, and satire—associated with Russian literature ever since and greatly influencing later Russian writers.

Born in Moscow, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen, and was widely recognized by the literary establishment by the time of his graduation from the Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo. Pushkin gradually became committed to social reform and emerged as a spokesman for literary radicals; in the early 1820s he clashed with the government, which sent him into exile in southern Russia. While under the strict surveillance of government censors and unable to travel or publish at will, he wrote his most famous play, the drama Boris Godunov, but could not publish it until years later. His novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, was published serially from 1825 to 1832.

Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova, whom he married in 1831, later became regulars of court society. In 1837, while falling into greater and greater debt amidst rumors that his wife had started conducting a scandalous affair, Pushkin challenged her alleged lover, Georges d'Anthès, to a duel. Pushkin was mortally wounded and died two days later.

Because of his liberal political views and influence on generations of Russian rebels, Pushkin was portrayed by Bolsheviks as an opponent to bourgeois literature and culture and a predecessor of Soviet literature and poetry.

Louise Bogan

 

Although Bogan attended Boston University for only one year in 1915-1916, her early education at Boston Girls' Latin School gave her a rigorous foundation. She was already writing poetry and reading Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in its first issues in 1912. While modernism in literature and the arts was gaining in momentum and shape, Bogan was quietly mastering metrics and defining her style. She later wrote passionately about her artistic awakening, describing a visit to her mother in the hospital. There in the room she saw a vase of marigolds: "Suddenly I recognized something at once simple and full of the utmost richness of design and contrast that was mine." Design and contrast are at the heart of her formal poetry, and the style that she crafted early did not vary much throughout her later years.

She married Curt Alexander in 1916, but the marriage was not a happy one. They had one daughter, born just a year later. By 1920 Bogan was a widow (she had earlier separated from her husband), left with a child to care for and without a reliable income. After moving to New York City, where she would live for the rest of her life, Bogan started to piece together the life of a working writer. She soon met other writers in the city's thriving literary community: William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Lola Ridge, John Reed (1887-1920), Marianne Moore, and, most important, Edmund Wilson, who became her early mentor. Wilson, already a man of reputation, urged her to write reviews of literature for periodicals, and this eventually became a steady source of income.

A year after modernism peaked in 1922 with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Bogan published her first book, Body of This Death. In contrast to Eliot's expansive, associative, free verse, Bogan's lyrics were brief, limited in theme, and highly formal. The volume, which was well received although many reviewers found the poetry obscure, speaks eloquently about love and grief, Bogan's twin themes. At this time she was seeing a psychiatrist to help her battle the depressions that relentlessly beset her and occasionally hospitalized her. Her life and her lyrics are intimately intertwined, although Bogan would be the last person to elucidate the connection. She was intensely private; for years many of her friends did not know she had a daughter.

Bogan had married again in 1925, this time to the writer Raymond Holden. This marriage, like the first, was troubled and did not last. Despite the personal turmoil, the 1920s and 1930s were Bogan's most productive poetic years. She published Dark Summer in 1929 and her third volume, The Sleeping Fury, in 1937. Other books that followed mainly collected previously published work and added a few new poems. The writing process for Bogan was painful and exacting; poems came rarely and at a cost. Her poem "The Daemon" depicts her muse as a monster demanding revelations again and again. Much of her work, in fact, draws upon the themes of silence and language as well as upon the failure of love.

During the 1930s, when many of her writer friends turned to the left, Bogan fought a lonely battle for literary purity. She was adamant that politics had no place in poetry; art called for something grander and more honest. Additionally, she saw the temporary defection of her friends (Edmund Wilson, Rolfe Humphries, Léonie Adams) as evidence of intellectual and emotional weakness and as a betrayal of the authority of the self.

During this decade she began reviewing poetry for the New Yorker, a job she held for thirty-eight years. Many of these reviews, as well as others, are collected in A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation (1970). Her prose is direct, nonacademic, and sharp. The series of articles on her two favorite poets, William Butler Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke, is particularly insightful. The poet W H. Auden thought she was the best critic of poetry in America.

Her occasional teaching stints, which began in the 1940s, were another, more direct way to influence the minds of young people. As the strain of writing poetry increased, Bogan turned more and more to criticism and education. In 1951 she was commissioned to write a short history of American poetry, eventually published as Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950, in which she does not once mention herself. She also translated poetry and prose and worked with younger writers (William Maxwell, for example) to help them distill beauty and truth from their writing.

The reviews of her last collections were admiring, if quietly so. Her second collection, Collected Poems, 1923-1953 (Poems and New Poems had come out in 1941), won a shared Bollingen Prize in 1955. Nonetheless, for most of her writing life she felt invisible in the literary world. Late in her life financial burdens eased somewhat, helped in large part by a monetary award from the Academy of American Poets in 1959 and another from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1967. Her final and most complete collection, The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (1968), contains only 103 poems. She died alone in her New York apartment, fighting the familiar depression she had wrestled with all her life.

Interest from feminist circles in the hidden lives of women writers has prompted new assessments of Bogan. The "mosaic" of her autobiographical pieces, Journey around My Room (1980), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Elizabeth Frank, Louise Bogan: A Portrait (1985), have introduced her to the general public. Yet Bogan remains a poet's poet, yielding beauty to those whose ear, mind, and heart are open to the demands of her poetry. Her work is particularly important in light of her place in the company of other modernists. In a time of experimentation, of a general loosening of structures and subjects, she held the line for formal poetry and for the precise blend of emotion and intellect to enliven that poetry.