The meeting of the jury for the Anad Kav Sanman 2009 took place in Delhi on 25th October 2009. The jury members for the award, Shri M.K Raina, Professor Bhagwan Josh, Professor Renuka Singh, Dr. Madan Gopal Singh, Bhai Baldeep Singh, Shri Manglesh Dabral attended the meeting chaired by Professor Satyapal Gautam. The jury unanimously decided that this year’s Anad Kāv Sanman be conferred on Amarjit Chandan for his seminal contribution to Punjabi poetry and for bringing Punjabi poetry on the international scene.
This is the only literary award of its kind in South Asia that exclusively celebrates poetic excellence. It is also amongst the biggest awards in terms of money.
Punjabi poet Surjit Patar was the first recipient of this award last year.
To honour the memory of the Punjabi poetess Baljit Kaur Tulsi, The Anād Foundation started Anad Kāv Tarang Poetry festival and Anad Kāv Sanman in 2008. The award, offered to eminent poets, includes a cash prize of Rupees 2.5 lacs, a citation, a silver plate and a turban.
The leading English author and art critic John Berger opined that Amarjit Chandan’s poetry transports its listeners or readers into an arena of timelessness. What he does is to fold time; time in his poems becomes like an arras or a hinged screen. The listener or reader is encircled by a multiplicity of times. His poetic practice assumes that there are more space-time dimensions than the four we habitually recognize. Each of Chandan’s poems proceeds in its own way and has its own form. Yet in all of them there is an assembly of different space-time dimensions.
According to Christina Linardakis, a well known literary critic from Greece, the pictures of Chandan’s poetry are lacking of anything pretentious. On the contrary, they are surprisingly intimate. They portray our own moments, they capture our thoughts, they express our dreams, the contradictions of our mind. Never the less, Chandan’s descriptive power is sublimating, the detail of their reference is depriving the reader’s right of an adroit escape, it holds out his hand disarmingly, it guides him through unusual and familiar paths.
In his poetic speech, Chandan is weaving and unweaving his impressions, the perceptions, the memories of each one of us, weaving in this manner mainly the thread of our own thought and of our own life.
Amarjit Chandan has published five collections of poetry including Kavitavān, Jarhān, Beejak, Chhanna, Gurhti and Anjal, as well three books of prose in Punjabi notably Phailsufiān, Hun–Khin (A discussion with Sohan Qadri) and Nishāni.
English versions of Amarjit Chandan’s poems have appeared in England in a collection Being Here (1995, 1999, 2005) and magazines Poetry Review, Artrage, Bazaar, Brand, Critical Quarterly, Modern Poetry in Translation, Index on Censorship and Atlas (UK), Papirus and Akköy (Turkey), Erismus, Ombrela and Odos Panos (Greece) and Lettre Internationale (Romania) and Sonata for Four Hands, Collection of Poems (Arc Publications) prefaced by John Berger due in Oct 2009.
The ANĀD Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion and preservation of culture, with particular focus on the preservation and perpetuation of the endangered intangible cultural heritage and traditions of South Asia. The ANĀD Foundation’s mission is to establish institutions as a means towards facilitating the recovery and enhancement of the intangible (sukham virsā) and tangible (sthūl virsā) heritage of South Asia as a priority.
Among the several aims of the Foundation include conferring ANĀD Sanmān, in the fields of poetry, music, dance, sports, science, technology, art, literature, theatre, cinema and handicrafts, etc. and for life time achievements in fields that the Trust is directly or indirectly concerned with.
The Anād Foundation is organizing the second edition of the festival Anād Kāv Tarang, an evening of poetry reading scheduled to be held on Sunday, November 22, 2009, at the India Islamic Cultural Centre, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi. A selection of Chandan’s 35 poems titled Paintee, designed by Gurvinder Singh and published by ANĀD, will also be released on the occasion. The function will conclude with musical renditions of Chandan’s poetry by Jasbir Jassi, Madan Gopal Singh, Rabbi Shergill, Sunanda Sharma and Bhai Baldeep Singh.
For further information, contact
The Anad Foundation
C-26, Nizamuddin East
New Delhi 110013
Telephone (Bhai Baldeep Singh) 9810002653
Email: anad@anad.in and/or bhaibaldeep@gmail.com
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