Bangla File
Essays & Verses
John Drew
Blurb:
These essays on literary, cultural and historical subjects, originally published in Bengal Lights and The Daily Star, are the work of a poet and scholar who has lived in some eight or ten countries. His writing has been praised for its imagination and erudition, damned for its originality and perversity. One critic’s suggestion that his is a quirky, quizzical, questioning mind is borne out by these essays that either introduce us to unfamiliar, eccentric figures or address familiar people and places in unexpectedly new ways. The verses are fresh and accessible. The reader can expect to be amused, at times perhaps even amazed.
Bio:
John Drew is a peripatetic poet and scholar who, with his wife Rani, likewise a writer, has studied, lived and worked in many places between Canada and China. He is the author of a counter-intuitive academic book, India and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford India), several unfashionable volumes of poetry beginning with The Lesser Vehicle (Bloodaxe Books) and The Buddha at Kamakura (Shueisha, Tokyo) and various miscellaneous booklets, including Middle East, The Dog and the Mongoose: the Indian Pirate Edition of the Rubaiyat of ‘Omar Khayyam (1862) and When Cricket First Came to India (CPW Eds). He surfaced in Bangladesh several years ago and now lives in Cambridge with his wife, their three children nearby in London. He plays cricket for Clare Hall.