The author of twelve books, Shanta Acharya’s publications range from poetry, literary criticism and fiction to finance. Her latest, Imagine: New and Selected Poems, was published by HarperCollins, 2017. Born and brought up in Cuttack, India, she was the first person in Odisha to win a scholarship to Oxford, and was among the first batch of women admitted to Worcester College in 1979. A National Scholar and a recipient of the Violet Vaughan Morgan Fellowship, she was awarded the Doctor of Philosophy for her work on Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English and American Literature and Languages at Harvard University before joining an American investment bank in London. She worked in the investment management industry and has written extensively on the subject.
The event will be chaired by Janet M. Wilson, Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton. She has written extensively on indigenous and white settler writing of Australasia, in particular New Zealand diasporic writers, and also has interests in refugee writing and subaltern cosmopolitanism. She is Vice-Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society, Chair of the Challenging Precarity Global Network, President of the National Conference of University Professors, editor-in chief of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and co-editor of Ibidem Verlag’s series and Studies in World Literature. Over the next 15 months, she is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Diaspora Screen Media Network. She recently co-edited Katherine Mansfield: New Directions (2020), and has recently published an edition of the war stories of Dan Davin, The General and the Nightingale (2020).
Poetry readings by Shanta Acharya, Kevin Ireland and Mimi Khalvati
Kevin Mark Ireland OBE is a poet, novelist, short story writer, and librettist. Shape of the Heart is his 26th collection of poems. Awards from New Zealand include an honorary doctorate, the 2004 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement and the 2006 A. W. Reed Award for his contribution to writing in New Zealand.
Mimi Khalvati has published nine collections of poetry with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize, and Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She is the founder of the Poetry School and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English Society. Her new collection of sonnets, Afterwardness, is a Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card and a book of the year in The Guardian and The Sunday Times.