Knotted Grief
In his first poetry volume, internationally renowned publisher Naveen Kishore has produced a collection of poems that, with compassion, protest society’s cruelty. Throughout Knotted Grief, Kishore lays bare the nature of our outer and inner realities, using striking symbolism to reveal what humans are capable of doing to each other. The early part of the collection, ‘Kashmiryiat’, is a visceral monument to shadows, widows and unlived lives, constructed with one hundred and five stanzas. By depicting large-scale human tragedies and familiar habits – “… fast forward into a dream / I fail to swipe my screen” – the poet tests himself, and us.
Born in Calcutta in 1953, Naveen Kishore received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature in 1973, and began working as a theatre lighting designer. He established Seagull Books in 1982, a publishing program in the arts and media focusing on drama, film, art and culture studies. Today, it also publishes literature, including poetry, fiction and non-fiction. In 1987 Kishore established The Seagull Foundation for the Arts, under the auspices of which he set up The Seagull School of Publishing in 2012.
Kishore is a photographer who has extensively documented female impersonators from Manipuri, Bengali and Punjabi theatre practices. In particular he photographed Chapal Bhaduri, a female impersonator of the Bengali folk theatre, Jatra, in a project entitled Performing the Goddess. Some of these pictures were exhibited as a part of a show titled Woman/Goddess. More recently in 2019 his suite of colour images from the Performing the Goddess project were exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery as a part of the Moving Still exhibition. More recently, Kishore exhibited his work at Chatterjee & Lal in Bombay in the exhibition Greenroom of the Goddess.
Kishore is the recipient of the Goethe Medal, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and was awarded the 2021 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.
Kishore has had his poems published with Scroll.in, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, RIC Journal, Gargoyle, Poetry at Sangam, Sylph Editions, London amongst others.
Kishore lives and works in Calcutta, India.
