Writers Workshop is a

Kolkata Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, comme ...

-based literary publisher founded by the Indian poet and scholar Purushottama Lal in 1958. It has published many new Indian authors of post-independence urban literature. Many of these authors later became widely known.

History

The Writers Workshop company was first founded as a group of eight writers (Lal, Deb Kumar Das, Anita Desai, Sasthibrata Chakravarti writing as

Sasthi Brata Sasthibrata Chakravarti (1939–2015), known as Sasthi Brata, was a British-Indian British Indians are citizens of the United Kingdom (UK) whose ancestral roots are from India. This includes people born in the UK who are of Indian origin ...

, William Hull, Jail Ratan, Kewlian Sio, and Pradip Sen) in 1958. It was an initiative of Purushottama Lal (1929–2010), a professor of English at St. Xavier's College, Calcutta. Although it mainly publishes Indian writing in English, it has also published books in other modern Indian languages. To date, the press has published over 3500 titles of

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek '' poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meani ...

novels A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself ...

drama Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has b ...

, and other literary works, with two focuses:

experimental literature Experimental literature is a genre that is, according to Warren Motte in his essa"Experimental Writing, Experimental Reading" "difficult to define with any sort of precision." He says the "writing is often invoked in an "offhand manner" and the ...

of the present day, and

translation Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transla ...

s from

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural diffusion ...

and other classical Indian languages. Writers Workshop of

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...

has published the first books by many authors who have gone on to become famous, including A. K. Ramanujan, Asif Currimbhoy,

Agha Shahid Ali Agha Shahid Ali (4 February 1949 – 8 December 2001) was an Indian-born poet who immigrated to the United States, and became affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism in American poetry. His collections include ''A Walk T ...

, Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra,

Chandrakant Bakshi Chandrakant Keshavlal Bakshi ( gu, ચંદ્રકાંત કેશવલાલ બક્ષી) was a Gujarati author from Gujarat, India and a former Sheriff of Mumbai. He was known for his bold and new concepts in writing during his time ...

, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Gieve Patel, Hoshang Merchant, Jayanta Mahapatra, Joe Winter, Keki Daruwalla, Kamala Das, Meena Alexander, Mani Rao, Saikat Majumdar, Nissim Ezekiel,

Pritish Nandy Pritish Nandy (born 15 January 1951) is an Indian poet, painter, journalist, parliamentarian, media and television personality, animal activist and maker of films, TV and streaming content. He was a parliamentarian in the Rajya Sabha from Mah ...

, Poile Sengupta,

R. Parthasarathy Rajagopal.Parthasarathy (born 1934) is an Indian poet, translator, critic, and editor. Early life and education Rajagopal Parthasarathy was born on 20 August 1934 in Tirupparaiturai near Tiruchchirappalli. He was educated at Don Bosco High Sch ...

Ruskin Bond Ruskin Bond (born 19 May 1934) is an Anglo-Indian author . His first novel, '' The Room on the Roof'', was published in 1956, and it received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1957. Bond has authored more than 500 short stories, essays, and ...

, Shiv Kumar, Saleem Peeradina, Tijan Sallah, Vihang A. Naik, Vikram Seth, and William Hull among others who have been included in ''The Golden Treasury of Writers Workshop Poetry''

. As Writers Workshop enters its sixth decade of existence, it has become an extremely important part of the literary history of India. Its titles are printed as hand-loom sari-bound volumes with exquisite

calligraphy Calligraphy (from el, link=y, καλλιγραφία) is a visual art related to writing. It is the design and execution of lettering with a pen, ink brush, or other writing instrument. Contemporary calligraphic practice can be defined ...

on them. Throughout its history, this alternative publishing venture has published authors without a distribution system to back it. Perhaps the most important publishing venture Writers Workshop has undertaken is Lal's translation of the entire Indian epic

Mahabharata The ''Mahābhārata'' ( ; sa, महाभारतम्, ', ) is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India in Hinduism, the other being the '' Rāmāyaṇa''. It narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the K ...

in 18 volumes (appearing 2005–2009). After Purushottama Lal's death in 2010, his family members now run his publishing house.

References

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External links

* {{Authority control Book publishing companies of India Companies based in Kolkata 1958 establishments in West Bengal Publishing companies established in 1958 Literary publishing companies