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Publishers for the Diaspora writers and poets Skylark Publications UK A Non-Profit Foundation

 Recipients of our Awards so far


●    Word Masala Award is only conferred on the published South-Asian diaspora poets with a substantial quality of work upholding their achievements to the highest standards. It will be akin to 'Lifetime Achievement'. We will be looking for a wider range of subject matter offered as well as the poet's recognizable contribution to literature, including any special achievements. All our past winners - we are very proud to say - have made us conscious of this fact. Only these winners will be invited to contribute to the winner's collection to be published by Skylark Publications UK. These winners will also nominate and help us in our consultations for future nominations. We do hope that our winners will help fellow diaspora poets where possible, and actively take an interest in this Foundation through mentoring, reviews, helping with a preface, providing comments for blurbs, helping to judge competitions, etc. Winners are also expected to include the mention of the award in their bio-data and link their page at www.skylarkpublications.co.uk to their blogs, social media platforms and web pages.

●    Others may receive WMP Special Citation Certificate Awards. For example, a citation can be for being an 'activist poet' or an 'emerging voice'. Our website will display such citations.

●    All the above-mentioned award winners and other generally featured poets may quote our Honour bestowed on them as Poet-of-the-Month.

●    In future, we intend to add Word Masala Poetry in Translation  Award as we start featuring the translation of well-known diaspora poets writing in the mother tongue. A separate collection will be published to celebrate their work.


About our Poet-of-the-Month Award

The Diaspora Poetry Films


Poetry Films are a very exciting genre, slowly making its mark. Like the concrete poetry this medium now takes us further in the realm of refreshed approach to the poetry that combines and experiments with the text, audio and the visuals. With the digital age one is able to explore this creative field easily. The link given here of my own film is linear, but with the third dimension adding its own meaning. There are many experiments of the medium in this genre that one can find through the search engines. The winner of the 2014 Turner Prize has put the short films on the mainstream art map now.


So please do explore and let us hear from you about your own poetry film. Please click below on the words, An exclamation, to get some idea about the genre.

An exclamation

Please note, Skylark Publication can help with your Foundation if you have a storyboard and the script idea. Enquire about the fees if you are interested.




A Review Group

Word Masala has set up a review group. We want to build up this group. Practical position in the publishing world is that if you are not prepared to review books by other poets and authors, it will be wrong to expect others to review your books. It takes time and effort. If everyone thinks it is a waste of time, then we will have a continued problem. If you are not pro-active in creating helpful conditions, then more and more publishers will ignore Diaspora writers. They are in it for the money. So let us feed their marketing with something that we can do. Please write to participate as much as you can to this group. Debjani Chatterjee has been successful in doing this exchange with Reginald Massey. Both have been featured in our past issues. I am spending as much time as I can to contact and find the magazines that will give us the space for articles on our poets and writers, as well as reviews. So please contact me to add your help in this matter.

And once again, may I request readers to go out of their way to encourage our Diasporic poets by acquiring their books from the links provided? Not only Daljit Nagra's book here, but the books recently published by the poets featured earlier, Debjani Chatterjee, Shanta Acharya, Usha Akella, and Reginald Massey.


Poetry e-books and a Poetry Club

We are in the process of setting up this opportunity. The e-books will be all 99 p. They will be 40 pages each. You can submit your own e-book for the consideration, or submit to Skylark for the publication. Please note this Foundation is again not about making money, but to spread the reading of poetry to a wider group of readers. This way poets also will support the other poet's work while their own work is being helped by the Foundation. Anyone can become a member to support this. There is no membership fee.

More details will be revealed when we have enough number of books on the list. We will organize pod-casts to help you in creating your own e-books.


Current winners of our prestigious award:            A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W X Y Z
























Poetry Films

Annual Celebration

We will work on organizing to present our award winning poets at the House of Lords as important and influential poets of the Diaspora. Lord Parekh and Lord Dholakia as patrons are very keen to see our Diaspora writers and poets making a success in the tough market for their literature in the host community.

Our supporting organization in the matter are, Vatayana, a Poetry-on-the-South-Bank movement run by Poet  and Novelist Divya Mathur, Gujarati Literary Academy, Turkish Cultural Centre UK, Poetry-in-the-House run by the poet and novelist Shanta Achraya, and many more organizations.




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A Presentation at the House of Lords

Competition

We are working on launching a poetry competition with a prize. The details will be announced in the near future.


Instead of any entry fee, we will ask the participants to buy any poetry collection from a selection of books we will offer to help publishers and our poets.


Publishers and poets are requested to approach us for such inclusion in the list for which there is no charge. But a special discount offer to the entrants is encouraged. An alternative to a discount for them will be to donate books from the diaspora poets in their catalogue to help Word Masala. The judges will be from our Word Masala Award Winners.


At this stage we are building a list of the books to include.  Please contact me if you want to participate in this listing.

How it works?


Poets are primarily nominated by our present winners, the editor, the guest editors, and patrons of Word Masala. But we have a panel as well. 2018 panel is listed on our home page. This then leads to further consultation in the background with feedback received from a wider group. Reading their work becomes an important part of this process. The decision of the Director of Word Masala Non-Profit Foundation, with the agreement of the patrons Lord Parekh and Lord Dholakia is final. An invitation is then issued to the respective poet.


The awards are not automatic as we have a responsibility to acknowledge and celebrate the extra-ordinary achievements of our featured poets. Hopefully, this will also draw urgent attention to their work from magazine editors, publishers, agents, and libraries.

Annual Anthologies


Once a year a Word Masala Poet-of-the-Month volume will be published to sample a selection of poems by our winners.





2016    

Word Masala Award     


1.    Pramila Venkateswaran

2.   Siddhartha Bose

3.    Kavita A. Jindal    

4.    Bobby Nayyar

5.    Phinder Dulai


2015

Word Masala Award


1.    Debjani Chatterjee

2.    Shanta Acharya

3.    Reginald Massey

4.    Usha Akella

5.    Daljit Nagra

6.    Saleem Peeradina

7.    Usha Kishore

8.    Meena Alexander

Please Click on the Name and Make a Discovery You will NOT Regret

WM Crowdfunding Award


1.       Mona Dash

WMP Special Citation Awards


   1.    Sweta Vikram

2017    

Word Masala Award     


1.    Prabhu Guptara

2.    Rishi Dastidar

3.    Bashabi Fraser