Indian English poet Sonnet Mondal has been invited to perform at the 29th edition of Genoa International Poetry Festival, Italy, to be held from June 9 to June 19 this year. The sonnet will perform at the Doge’s Palace in Genoa on 9 June and at a poetry and music concert at the Doge’s Palace Museum on 12 June with the Danish-Slovakian poets Martin Solotruk and Søren Ulrik Thomsen.
The Genoa International Poetry Festival is the largest and oldest poetry festival in Italy. Over the years, the festival has presented other poets and artists such as Lou Reed, John Giorno, Juan Gelman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Mahmoud Darvish, Adonis, Nobel laureate Zslav Milosz, Derek Walcott, John Coetzee, Gao Jingjian and Wole Soyinka. Alvaro Mutis, Manuel Vasquez Montalbán, Yusuf Komunyaka, Mario Luzzi and many others.
Author of eight collections of poetry, Sonnet Mondal’s acclaimed books include Karmic Chanting released in 2018, Ink & Line in 2018 and most recently, An Afternoon in My Mind in 2022. An Afternoon in My Mind, published by Copper Coin, has been described by critics as “mysterious in its tone and a book of a million moments”.
One of India’s most traveled poets of the contemporary era, Sonnet has been invited to several poetry and literature festivals, including Struga Poetry Evenings in Macedonia, Cork International Poetry Festival in Ireland, Berlin International Poetry Festival in Germany and Istanbul Contains International Poetry. festival, among others. She led the Indian delegation to the Ars Poetica Festival in Slovakia in 2016, the same year she was awarded the Gayatri Gummarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence. Later, he represented India at the tenth anniversary edition of the Istanbul International Poetry and Literature Festival and was part of the Indian delegation at the Lviv International Book Fair in Ukraine in 2019.
Speaking about the importance of poetry, Sonnet said, “Since the beginning of time, poetry and poets have transcended national boundaries and have been instrumental in igniting discussions and discourses that have shaped the literary history of the country.” A poet’s literary responsibility to society is to uphold the truth and temper it with fiction, and I believe that this kind of writing has a far more important function than the light-hearted news articles that we See everyday. Our cultural doctrine is written in the form of poetry, and our cultural doctrine is what assures future generations that we exist and that it matters. That’s the importance of poetry.”