Born in Calcutta in 1953, Naveen Kishore received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature in 1973, and began working as a theatre lighting designer. He established Seagull Books in 1982, a publishing programme focusing on drama, film, art and culture studies, which is today among the most admired and successful independent publishers of world literature. Kishore is the recipient of the Goethe Medal, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and was awarded the 2021 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. He lives and works in Calcutta.
<p>Mother Muse Quintet is a memorial work of the imagination. Memory, like a veil that is translucent and yet shaped by an ever-present fog that lifts and settles, travels the path of multiple generations who appear as storytellers, as companions, as mysterious versions of the self and, poignantly, as Mother Muse—both birth mother and mother tongue. Mother Muse, a vanishing presence, shapes the imagination of her son, like the heart beating or the wind dashing or the wave cresting. Mother Muse becomes the breath, gentle or fierce, of the poet’s own voice. He dreams and in dreaming, he writes and in writing, he finds a language so mysterious that, like the fog shawling the spectral presences throughout this text, it lifts and settles and lifts again in cadences of flux and fragility. This is a haunting and hypnotic collection in which we feel silence and stillness seep into the crevices of language. The words—which seem to emerge from our own memories, dreams and secret vaults of imagination, as from the author’s—swirl, like time itself, in a slow, timeless vortex of loss and longing, death and life.</p><div><br></div>
