Westland Books announces the release of Treasurer of the Piggy Banks, written by Vinod Kumar Shukla and translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

by Priya Jadhav

June 2024, National: Westland Books is pleased to announce the release of Treasurer of the Piggy Banks, written by Vinod Kumar Shukla and translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. This is the fourth book in the Literary Activism series, the publishing imprint of Westland Books in collaboration with Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University.

Vinod Kumar Shukla is widely regarded as the greatest living writer in Hindi and winner of the 2023 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The collection of poems reflects Shukla’s observations of his, and other things’, relationship to the universe – whichever bit of this occupies Shukla in that moment, be it bylanes, a kitchen, a bus-stop or a market. His works are characterised by a persistent logic, as well as of a language that’s mathematical-scientific in scope.

This bilingual edition is the first selection of his poems to appear in English. Drawing from all his previously published books, it covers 60 years of Shukla’s poetic career, from the pamphlet Lagbhag Jaihind (1971) to his recent poems. His translator, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, is a well-known poet, editor, and anthologist.

As Amit Chaudhuri, series editor, says about the poems, “One can hardly think of a record in literature that possesses a comparable uniqueness, or of a body of knowledge that is indispensable.”

Treasurer of the Piggy Banks will be available 6 June onwards in bookstores and online.

About Westland Books: Westland Books is an award-winning Indian publisher with a diverse and exciting range of books from popular and literary fiction to business, politics, biography, spirituality, popular science, health, and self-help. Its key publishing imprints include Context, which publishes award-winning literary fiction and non-fiction; Eka, which publishes the best of contemporary writing in Indian languages and in translation; Tranquebar, home to the best new fiction from the Indian subcontinent; the eponymous Westland Sport, Westland Business and Westland Non-Fiction, and ‘Red Panda’, which publishes a range of books for children of different ages.

About Literary Activism: ‘Literary activism’ is a project that began in 2014 with a series of annual symposia. Its aim was to create a space for the kind of discussion on creativity no longer available in mainstream contexts (literary festivals, book launches) or in academic ones (conferences, classrooms, monographs). The literary activism website – literaryactivism.com – was created in 2020, and Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University came into existence in 2022 at Ashoka University to give this project a home, and to look at the kind of thinking that writing and the arts comprise.

About Ashoka University: Ashoka is India’s premier liberal arts university located in the National Capital Region, New Delhi. Ashoka University is built on the finest global best practices of institution and university governance. Accomplished leaders, philanthropists, thinkers, and academicians with expertise in varied fields have come together to create the university. It brings the best contemporary values and practices in higher education, in the tradition of the world’s leading universities, to India. With a strong emphasis on multi-disciplinary learning, development of skills and leadership attributes for 21st century, Ashoka prepares its 2500+ students to be critical thinkers and ethical leaders in an increasingly diverse world. It is a private, non-profit University, established under the Haryana Private Universities Act, 2006, having its place of business at 2 Rajiv Gandhi Education City, Sonipat, Haryana 131029 in India.