Siddhartha Bose
Siddhartha Bose is a poet, playwright and performer based in London. He was born and raised in India, followed by a seven-year stint in the USA.
Siddhartha’s work has appeared internationally in Fulcrum (USA), The Literary Review (USA), Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, UK, 2009) Dear World and Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe, 2012), Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian Poets (Bloodaxe, 2012) and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (HarperCollins, India, 2012). Siddhartha’s debut book, Kalagora, appeared in 2010 (Penned in the Margins, UK). He has been featured on BBC 4 (TV), BBC Radio 3 and was dubbed one of the ‘ten rising stars of British poetry’ by The Times. He has performed at festivals and venues like Latitude, Alchemy, DSC South Asian Literature Festival, the British Council Showcase (Norwich ‘12), New York University, Southbank Centre, and Ronnie Scott’s.
Siddhartha has written, performed, and toured a one-man play, also called Kalagora, which toured for two years playing venues like the Nottingham Playhouse, Liverpool Bluecoat, Royal Exchange Theatre Studio (Manchester), Kaffe Burger (Berlin) and Camden People’s Theatre (London). The play completed a critically acclaimed run at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2011.
Siddhartha is a Leverhulme Fellow in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. His new theatre show, London’s Perverted Children, had a run at The Yard Theatre, London in July 2012. The LPC project was recently long-listed for an Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award.
What people say
On Kalagora, the play
“an extraordinary odyssey”
“Stunning in its simplicity and endeavour [...] It remains the most mesmerising play I have had the pleasure of seeing”
***** Broadway Baby
“A surreal one-man show [...] like a mash-up of Allen Ginsberg and Salvador Dali”
**** Three Weeks
“a one-man tour–de-force”
ScotsGay
“a name to look out for“
LeftLion
“Kalagora is a hymn to cities, to their richness, their colour, their noise, sprawl and energy, and to the process of cultural merging, mixing and melting that categorises the urban experience”
Natasha Tripney, Exeunt
“One of the stand-out spoken word shows of last year’s Edinburgh Fringe”
Bel Cameron, Exeunt
Performed with great energy and attack with flawless delivery [...] this global language is Bose’s gift to the stage. Just as Shakespeare coined new words borrowed from other languages and made the stage a Pentecostal Tower of Babel so Bose has Kalagora speak a language at once as English as any Oxford Don’s, and as foreign as Bengali or Hindi might be to the same Oxford Don”
John O’ Donoghue, Decibel Performing Arts Showcase Review
“The writing is superb, yet the play’s true skill lies in Bose’s deliverance of the script”
Isabelle Koy-Dibley, Plays to See
On Kalagora, the book of poems
“One of the most exciting first collections I’ve come across in a long time. Kalagora bestrides continents and celebrates cities as engines of creativity where dogs talk in hieroglyphs and where a man can be a moth.”
Ian McMillan, The Verb, BBC Radio 3
“Bose’s use of language – invented words, nouns made into verbs and other colourful concoctions – produces a writhing, seething, pulsating poetry.”
The Poetry Book Society Bulletin
“This is a collection that is always dramatic, always in tune with the sensational possibilities of language and the spectacular turn of phrase”
Charles Beckett, Wasafiri
“Bose is also a “hybrid” poet, in the post-colonial sense of the term – his work in Kalagora aiming to merge, bridge, fuse, and intertwine (as they say), the diction, themes, and experiences, of various centres, some cosmopolitan, others less so, in a far more earnestly engaged (and academic) way than Daljit Nagra does.”
Todd Swift, Poetry Review
“This is rampantly active and radioactive poetry; crammed with shock visions and a siege of narratives. The cumulative effect is powerful and intense; Kalagora is a vital book of poems for the 21st century.”
James Byrne
“Kalagora is one of the most impressive debut volumes I have read in recent years.”
Sudeep Sen
Pitting the surrealist against the Romantic, Bose carves out a mongrelized but fruitful crop, proving with Kalagora that a new and vital generation of ‘diaspora’ poets is desperately needed to forge new models among the tired ways of thinking about race, distance and the ‘immigrant experience’.
Sandeep Parmar, The Wolf magazine
“Kalagora is an incantatory assertion, if not of identity, then of power and confidence of moving through identities”
Tony Williams, Magma
Gallery
Photography by Liam Davenport for Penned in the Margins.
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Contact
You can contact Siddhartha directly at illishmach@yahoo.com or at s.bose@qmul.ac.uk
You can also contact him via his Publisher/Producer at the following address:
Siddhartha Bose
c/o Penned in the Margins
22 Toynbee Studios
28 Commercial Street
London E1 6AB
Telephone: 020 7375 0258
Email: info@pennedinthemargins.co.uk
