Limehouse Books Yurt Salon with South Asian Poets

On Tuesday 21st June, Limehouse's Yurt Salon will feature four internationally renowned South Asian poets:

Yogesh Patel
Usha Akella
Meena Alexander
Debjani Chatterjee
The Performers:

As a co-editor of Skylark, Yogesh Patel has published international contemporary poetry since the seventies. Currently, he runs Skylark Publications UK, and a non-profit Word Masala project to promote writers and poets of South Asian diaspora.Yogesh is also a founder of the literary charity, Gujarati Literary Academy, and has served as its president. He was a Fellow of the International Poetry Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Amidst other awards, he was has received the Freedom of the City of London and has four LP records, two films, radio programmes, children’s books, fiction and non-fiction books, including poetry collections to his credit.

Usha Akella has authored 4 books and scripted and produced one musical. She was selected as a creative ambassador for Austin in 2014-15. She has been invited to many international poetry festivals. She will join a group of eminent south Asian poets to read at the House of Lords in June 2016. She is the founder of the Poetry Caravan and has been accepted to the MSt in Creative Writing at Cambridge university, UK in the fall of 2016.

Meena Alexander described in The Statesman (India) as “undoubtedly one of the finest poets in contemporary times” is the author of Atmospheric Embroidery (Hachette India, 2015) She was born in India, raised there and in Sudan and at the age of eighteen went to England to study. Her volumes of poetry include Illiterate Heart (2002) winner of the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk (2004) and Birthplace with Buried Stones (2013). She is the editor of Indian Love Poems and author of the critically acclaimed memoir Fault Lines. She has received awards from the Guggenheim, Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundations , the Arts Council of England and the Imbongi Yesizwe International Poetry Award from South Africa . She is the author of eight books of poetry, two novels, two volumes of essays and the memoir Fault Lines (Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year), Her poetry has been translated and set to music, most recently by the Swedish composer Jan Sandstrom. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center/ Hunter College, CUNY.

Debjani Chatterjee has been called a ‘national treasure’ (Barry Tebb). She has worked in industry, teaching, community relations and art psychotherapy. An acclaimed international poet, children’s writer, editor, translator, Olympic torchbearer and storyteller; her awards include an MBE, Sheffield Hallam University’s honorary doctorate and Word Masala's Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. Ex-Chair of the National Association of Writers in Education, she was Poet-in-Residence at Sheffield Children’s Hospital and is an Associate Royal Literary Fellow and Patron of Survivors' Poetry. Her 65+ books include: Animal Antics, Namaskar: New and Selected Poems and Do You Hear the Storm Sing?