Over three days subtle
changes took place
in
the landscape, visible
only to passengers on trains, along some of Scotland’s busiest
commuter routes.
4 June
Aberdeen - Dundee
5 June
Dundee - Edinburgh
6 June
Edinburgh - Glasgow
Raman Mundair is a writer and artist. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, 'A Choreographer's Cartography' and 'Lovers, Liars, Conjurers and Thieves' – both published by Peepal Tree Press and 'The Algebra of Freedom,' (a play) published by Aurora Metro Press. Her collection of short stories 'In the Light of Other' will be published in 2008. In 2007 her play 'The Algebra of Freedom' was produced to great acclaim by 7:84 Theatre Company and in 2006 she collaborated with the National Theatre Scotland Young Company and Òran Mòr - A Play, A Pie, A Pint on 'Side Effects', a one-act play. As an artist she makes work that represents text and narrative in a visual form. Her work has been exhibited at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, City Art Gallery, Leicester and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin.
Raman has been nominated for the prestigious Rolex Mentor and Protégé Award 2008. In 2007 Raman was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Award and in 2006 she was runner up in the Penguin Decibel Prize for Short Fiction. She has also been awarded the prestigious Arts Council England International Fellowship at the India International Centre in Delhi and several Scottish Arts Council Fellowships. In 2008 she will be a Scottish Poetry Library Poet Partner for East Dumbarton and a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellow at the Hotel Chevillon in Grez-sur-Loing, France. The Independent newspaper wrote in a review of her work "Raman Mundair is a rare breed: a poet whose writing works on the page and the stage. Her readings reveal the secret music of the poem… Mundair is literature at its best: thoughtful, provocative and sharp."
Review quotes:
"Raman Mundair [is a] daring and worldly writer who flits across genres and forms like they were dancefloor tiles… She has staked her claim to Scotland's heart, a heart as tender and troubled as her poetry, prose and playwriting. In her stunning, sensual and subtle collection, Lover's Liars, Conjurers and Thieves, Mundair dances with words, dares and double dares, ram raids the reader's heart, then does a runner. Later, her lines return like lost lambs in the night, but with the cry of wolves not far behind. A shape-shifter, voice thrower and stealer of breath, she shows that even in a place as cold as this northern outpost language can bubble and brim over."
Discovering Scottish Literature - A Contemporary Overview, 2008
"There's a stripped-down elegance pulsing through Mundair's text"
The Herald
"The Algebra of Freedom is a strong, important play… by [a] fast-rising young British playwright"
The Scotsman
"... you never get quite what you might expect…The poems [...] are tautly observed, and their conflicts subtly established…[and] are as honest and as compulsively readable as anything in Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters."
The New Shetlander
"This is gutsy writing; even the silent spaces in between words are emotionally raw."
Wasafiri
"[Her] poems…combine honesty…with precisely turned and unobtrusive language whose rhythms always have a sense of rightness." World Literature Today
"Dance in all its forms, from tango to hip-hop, is the metaphor Raman Mundair uses in the title poem of her second collection. It's a compelling and vibrant poem that leads to a sequence on the waltz, and helps us understand the variety and experimentation that characterise this work…Mundair makes a case for art's ability to cross borders, to focus on 'emotional geography' rather than nationality. The collection opens with 14 poems written in Shetland dialect, several of them focused on the shoormal - 'the place where the sea meets the shore' (and, by implication, the crossing point from unbounded sea to land with all its customs, language and history). Edgy and disturbing, these poems mix lyrical beauty with uncertainty and violence…The strength of this book is Mundair's determination to go where we least expect, to transform the radical steps poets like Carol Ann Duffy, Moniza Alvi and Grace Nichols have taken into 'a new dance.'"
Mslexia
Contact Information:
Raman Mundair
ramanmundair@gmail.com www.ramanmundair.com (under construction)
Publishers
Peepal Tree Press [ T +44 (0) 113 245 1703 / hannah@peepaltreepress.com ] (Poetry/Prose)
Aurora Metro [ T +44 (0) 208 898 4488 / cheryl@aurorametro.com ] (Plays)
Pernille Spence
Anthony Schrag
Raman Mundair
Litza Bixler
Jenny Brownrigg
Performers