Poet Frank Báez participates in the Kolkata Book Fair and the Jaipur Literary Festival
New Delhi - From February 1 to 3, 2023, the Dominican writer Frank Baez participated in the Kolkata Book Fair, the largest event dedicated to literature on the Asian continent.
As part of his activities at the fair, coordinated by the Embassy of the Dominican Republic in India, Frank Baez presented the book Nirgum Dwiper Padabali, a selection of his poems translated into Bengali by the poet Sajjad Sharif from Bangladesh and published by the Kolkata publishing house Raban Prakashana.
During the presentation ceremony, held in the pavilion of Spain, the fair's guest country, Frank Báez and Sajjad Sharif, communicated how their remote collaboration gave birth to Nirgum Dwiper Padabali. They also read a selection of the book's poems in their Spanish and Bengali versions.
The Dominican Ambassador to India, David Puig, highlighted the importance of this publication conceived by the Dominican mission in India. "Frank Baez's book in Bengali is a concrete example of what cooperation between countries of the global south in the cultural field can be. This project involved Frank Baez, a Dominican author; Sajjad Sharif, a poet and translator from Bangladesh; and Raban Prakashana, an Indian publisher. I am proud that we can contribute, through culture, to weave these links between people and to promote Dominican literature in a language such as Bengali with 300 million speakers in India and Bangladesh."
During his stay in India, Frank Baez also participated in the Jaipur Literary Festival, where he shared the stage with the Indian poets Meena Kandasamy, Anupama Raju, Rolee Agarwal, and Mugdha Sinha. In New Delhi, he was invited by the University of Delhi and the Cervantes Institute, alongside Indian poet Subhro Bandopadhyay, for a bilingual reading of his poems in English and Spanish.
Known primarily for his poetic work, Frank Baez is also the author of fiction, chronicles, and essays. He is one of the founders of El Hombrecito, the first Dominican spoken word band, which has released three albums to date. Some of his books have been fully translated into English, Arabic, German, and Dutch. In 2015, two hundred academics selected him to be part of the anthology El Canon Abierto published by Visor, which brings together the most relevant Spanish language poets born after 1971. In 2018 Baez was part of the Bogotá39-2017 list that brings together the most promising writers under the age of 39.