Amit Chaudhuri and Sudeep Sen at the launch of Fractals at Oxford Bookstore. (Arnab Mondal)

It’s been a long time since Calcutta witnessed a poet launch the book of another poet friend.

Author and poet Amit Chaudhuri, unveiled Sudeep Sen’s “refracted and slightly splayed” Fractals, a collection of 300 new and select earlier poems. Chaudhuri was happy to rediscover prose poem in the book by his friend of 20 years. The poem, Rain, he said, was an addition to Indian writing in English.

Sen acknowledged that Gerard Manley Hopkins was a key influence in terms of craft. The poet, who wrote the most during his five-year stay in Dhaka, read out a few poems, including his translation of Jibanananda Das’s Bonolata Sen. “I translate from Bengali, Hindi and Urdu, which I read in Devanagari script. I have hated Tagore and admired Kazi Nazrul Islam and Das. It was only during my later years that I fell in love with the bearded man. When I translate, I try to keep the original metre of the poem intact,” he said.

Sen, who loves the art of erotica, is widely recognised as a major new generation voice in world literature and “one of the finest younger English-language poets in the international literary scene”. Also present at the launch were Keki Daruwalla, Devdan Chaudhuri, Anjana Basu, Sanjukta Dasgupta and Debashish Lahiri.

Thriller part I

It’s a story of a young girl living alone in Mumbai and a stalker. Yet the author admits that the plot goes beyond that. Novoneel Chakraborty launched the first book of his trilogy, Marry Me, Stranger, along with author and school buddy Arindam Dey, at Oxford Bookstore recently.

“Seven years ago, both of us were here at Oxford attending a book launch. Standing at the back of the room, we shared a literary dream with each other. Today we have both made the dream come true and written books,” Dey said at the start of the interaction.

Many among the audience had already started reading the thriller and were eager to know who is “stalking” Rivanah Banerjee, the central character. “No way will I reveal the stranger,” laughed Chakraborty. He went on to share how the title of his book came first and then the plot. “I knew this one could not be completed in a single volume. It will be a long story. It is a character-driven plot. I wanted the first book to be so gripping that readers would demand a sequel.”

Chakraborty also spoke about how most of his novels are from the woman’s point of view. “Rivanah, meaning golden river, is initially portrayed as soft and vulnerable but later she becomes bolder and a woman of substance,” he added, confessing that portraying a character’s dark side came naturally to him. “The dark shades make my characters more real. We are all dark in our spaces.”