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The inaugural edition of the Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Prize celebrated the power of poetry
Poets are good actors,/ Good actors as they say are fresh,/ They are elses to the part they play/ So I play out this frowning poet’s role/ And you look at me tenderly. from
Entr’acte by Deepankar Khiwani
Deepankar Khiwani died at the age of 47 on March 28 last year. A fortnight before his death, Khiwani had shared his latest poems, where he describes art as “a dark condemned space with the door unlocked”, with Arundhathi Subramaniam. “I shall revisit those finely-wrought last poems, reminding myself that, for all the darkness and incarceration around us, somewhere there is an ‘unlocked’ door,” wrote Subramaniam two days after Khiwani’s death.