Westland Books announces the release of Treasurer of the Piggy Banks, written by Vinod Kumar Shukla and translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Westland Books is pleased to announce the release of Treasurer of the Piggy Banks, written by Vinod Kumar Shukla and translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. This is the fourth book in the Literary Activism series, the publishing imprint of Westland Books in collaboration with Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University.

Vinod Kumar Shukla is widely regarded as the greatest living writer in Hindi and winner of the 2023 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The collection of poems reflects Shukla’s observations of his, and other things’, relationship to the universe – whichever bit of this occupies Shukla in that moment, be it bylanes, a kitchen, a bus-stop or a market. His works are characterised by a persistent logic, as well as of a language that’s mathematical-scientific in scope.

This bilingual edition is the first selection of his poems to appear in English. Drawing from all his previously published books, it covers 60 years of Shukla’s poetic career, from the pamphlet Lagbhag Jaihind (1971) to his recent poems. His translator, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, is a well-known poet, editor, and anthologist.

As Amit Chaudhuri, series editor, says about the poems, “One can hardly think of a record in literature that possesses a comparable uniqueness, or of a body of knowledge that is indispensable.”

Treasurer of the Piggy Banks will be available 6 June onwards in bookstores and online.