Celebrate Pride Month with Harpercollins by Grabbing a Copy of This Anthology of Queer Poetry!

16 June 2020

‘A bold and necessary correction to the subcontinent’s poetry canon.’
Jeet Thayil

‘… what we hold in our hands is a diverse collection of brilliance. This book is not interested in narrowing down what a poem is, and it is not interested in narrowing what identity can allow a poem to do!’
Jericho Brown

‘Poignant, sensual and witty, this anthology captures with great beauty and depth a multiplicity of queer experiences, both in South Asia and its diasporas. It does what poetry does best: takes us to the heart of emotionally powerful experiences and allows us to live vividly in them.’
Shyam Selvadurai

‘These poems are rooms that lead us into secret chambers and then thrust us into the world, saying, “Listen to what needed listening to so long ago.” Is it any wonder then, that these poems are tender and fierce and all the colours in between?’
Tishani Doshi

About the Book

This first-of-its-kind anthology brings together the best of contemporary queer poetry from the subcontinent and its many diasporas. The World That Belongs to Us features well-known voices like Hoshang Merchant, Vikram Seth, Ruth Vanita, Kazim Ali, Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha, Rajiv Mohabir, Fatimah Asghar as well as a host of new poets. The themes range from desire and loneliness, sexual intimacy and struggles, caste and language, activism both on the streets and in the homes, the role of family both given and chosen, and heartbreaks and heartjoins.

Featuring poetry in a number of languages including Bengali, English, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi and Urdu, this is an urgent, imaginative and beautiful testament to the diversity, politics, aesthetics and ethics of queer life in South Asia today.

About the editors:

Aditi Angiras is a poet, writer and artist based in New Delhi. She is the founder of Bring Back the Poets, a queer collective of South Asian poets.

Akhil Katyal is a poet, translator and teacher based in Delhi. His third book of poems Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems came out in 2020.

‘The World that Belongs to Us is a testament to the many, many voices that exist across the diverse queer communities of South Asia. They are loud, resonant, vulnerable, moving all at the same time, and get along with each other as often as they don’t. What poetry does uniquely is capture how the world arrives at each of our doorsteps, how it pervades our emotions, juggles our identities, informs our politics. Poetry witnesses like other mediums can’t. The more than hundred poets and translators who contributed to this volume do amazing things with this peculiar capacity of the form.’ – Aditi Angiras & Akhil Katyal, editors of The World that Belongs to Us  

‘We’re very excited to be publishing The World That Belongs to Us, the first-ever queer poetry anthology to come out of South Asia, featuring the work of over a hundred poets and translators. This is a book that’s one of a kind and close to our hearts; we hope that it will find a very wide and appreciative readership.’
–  Udayan Mitra, Publisher – Literary, HarperCollins 

‘It has been nothing short of exhilarating to watch this volume evolve and grow into a ground-breaking anthology of contemporary poetry that will help fill gaps in our histories. The poems in the book bear witness to the multiple realities of queer lives in South Asia. As readers, we’re lucky to have Aditi and Akhil bring together so many incredible and urgent voices in one book.’
– Sohini Basak, Editor, HarperCollins

For any queries please contact: sagiri.dixit@harpercollins.co.in
Rs 599 | Poetry/Anthology | HarperCollins India

https://www.amazon.in/World-That-Belongs-Us-Anthology/dp/9353574579