CANTO Poetry Festival 2023

UChicago Center in Delhi, Baba Kharak Singh Marg, Connaught Place, New Delhi

The Bengal Club, Kolkata

CANTO is a four-day international, multilingual, multicultural, traveling poetry festival, to be held across Kolkata and New Delhi, from 15th to 19th of March 2023. This festival brings together some of the most eminent poets, translators and intellectuals globally, including George Szirtes (Man International Booker Prize, T.S. Elliot Prize), Vijay Seshadri (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry), Daljit Nagra (Forward Prize), Wendy Doniger (PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, Tishani Doshi (Forward Prize, Eric Greegory Award), Amit Chaudhuri (Commonwealth Writer’s Prize & Infosys Prize in Humanities), Rosanna Warren (American Academy of Arts & Letters, Guggenheim Foundation), K. Satchidanandan (Dante Medal), Bibek Debroy (Padma Shri) and a host of Sahitya Akademi Award winners, including Joy Goswami, Anita Nair, and Arundhati Subramaniam. 

Please visit the CANTO website for all details about the sessions and speakers.   

Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanega, Festival Advisor and Principal Investigator 

Lina M. Ferreira C.-V. graduated with both a creative nonfiction writing and a literary translation MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Drown Sever Sing from Anomalous press and Don’t Come Back, from Mad Creek Books, as well as the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology The Great American Essay and the forthcoming 100 Refutations hybrid anthology from Mad Creek Books. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translation work has been featured in various journals including The Bellingham Review, The Chicago Review, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Poets & Writers and the Sunday Rumpus, among others. She’s been the recipient of the Best of the Net award and the Iron Horse Review’s Discovered Voices award, she has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and is a Rona Jaffe and Franke fellow. She moved from Colombia to China to Columbus to Chicago, where she works as an assistant professor for the University of Chicago.

AVIK CHANDA, Festival Director 

Avik Chanda, bestselling author, columnist, entrepreneur and business advisor, is the Festival Director for CANTO. He is the author of two poetry collections, “Jokhon Bideshe” (Protibhaash, 2006), and “Footnotes” (Shearsman, 2008). His debut novel, “Anchor” was published by HarperCollins, in 2014. His business book, “From Command To Empathy: Using EQ in the Age of Disruption” (HarperCollins, 2017), was selected for Amazon India’s Best Reads, under ‘Business, Strategy and Management’. His latest book, “Dara Shukoh: The Man Who Would Be King” (HarperCollins, 2019), is a critically-acclaimed, national bestseller, and has been released as an audiobook by Audible. His poetry has appeared in publications such as The Queen’s Quarterly, Shearsman, Stride Magazine, Orbis, Other Poetry, Envoi, Borderlines, Brittlestar, Coffee House Poetry, Octavo Review, Reflections, Morpo, Spork, Richmond Review, Aesthetica, and in the anthologies, The Allotment and First Proofs (Penguin India).