Poetry Reading

This event hosted by Hopscotch Reading Room in cooperation with the University of Potsdam's English Department brings together three poets from the  Subcontinent – Sabitha Satchi, Abul Kalam Azad and Uzma Falak. Our guests will first read from their works and then enter into a discussion with each others as well as the audience.

Sabitha Satchi is a poet in English and Malayalam, art curator, and cultural theorist. She taught English at Delhi University for fourteen years. She has been awarded the Paul Mellon Fellowship (Yale Center for British Art, U.S.A.), Commonwealth Scholarship (U.K.), C.S.D.S. Independent Fellowship (New Delhi), Vyloppilli Memorial Sree Rekha Award for Malayalam Poetry, among other fellowships & awards. She is the author of Hereafter (2021). Her poems have appeared in various anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, Ed. Jeet Thayil (2022), Singing in the Dark (2020), Witness (2021) and many leading journals. Sabitha is one of the two Indian poets in Insurrections Ensemble, an ongoing collaborative Afro-Asia project between South Africa and India. Her most recent project as art curator was Posthumous Dialogues with F.N. Souza, an exhibition featuring works by 26 contemporary Indian artists in homage to Francis Newton Souza’s artistic legacy, for The Raza Foundation, New Delhi.

Abul Kalam Azad (she/they) is a poet who lost her poems to language , and her words keep digging for roses in a world that severs the roots. Their words previously found shelter in various journals and anthologies like Saaranga: Telugu monthly,  Cha: An Asian literary journal, Tokyo Poetry Journal, The Sunflower Collective, Raiot, Muse India, Best Indian Poetry 2018 Anthology, A Map called Home Anthology.

Born and raised in Kashmir’s Srinagar, Uzma Falak is a DAAD doctoral fellow in anthropology at the University of Heidelberg where her research explores Kashmir women’s sonic praxis as an enactment of an alternate spatiotemporal imaginary. She has taught at the University of Delhi and the University of Tübingen. Her work including poetry, essays, academic articles and reportage have appeared in English Language Notes, Disclaimer, Economic and Political Weekly, Himalaya, Anthropology and Humanism, Guernica Magazine, The Baffler, Adi Magazine, Al Jazeera English, Warscapes, Himal Southasian, Jadaliyaa, The Caravan, The Polis Project, The Electronic Intifada, Palestinian Chronicle and several edited collections like Gossamer: An Anthology of Contemporary World Poetry, Of Occupation and Resistance: Writings from Kashmir, and Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak? among others. In 2017, she won an honorable mention in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s Ethnographic Poetry Award. She has been a part of the Warwick-Tate Exchange (2018) held at the Tate Modern and the inaugural cohort of the Regional Arts Australia’s artist-led online studio program (2021-2022). She was also an artist-in-residence at Liquid Architecture (Naarm/Melbourne) as part of the cohort, Capture All: A Sonic Investigation, and presented her work (as a lecture performance) at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). Her documentary film, Till then The Roads Carry Her, explores Kashmir women’s repertories of resistance.