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Captive Imagination

Captive Imagination

Letters From Prison

Varavara Rao
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Poet, Marxist critic and activist, Varavara Rao (VV) has been continually persecuted by the state and intermittently imprisoned since 1973, but he never stopped writing during all these decades, even from within prison. When he was subjected to ‘one thousand days of solitary confinement’ during 1985­-89 in Secunderabad Jail, a leading national daily invited him to write about his prison experiences.

While prison writing is a hoary tradition, no writer has had the opportunity to publish his writings from jail. VV, however, did meet the demands placed on him as a writer, despite constraints of censorship by jail authorities and the Intelligence section. He decided to test his creative powers in jail on the touchstone of his readers’ response and expressed himself in a series of thirteen remarkable essays on imprisonment, from prison.

Imprint: India Viking

Published: Mar/2010

ISBN:

Length : Pages

MRP : ₹14.99

Captive Imagination

Letters From Prison

Varavara Rao

Poet, Marxist critic and activist, Varavara Rao (VV) has been continually persecuted by the state and intermittently imprisoned since 1973, but he never stopped writing during all these decades, even from within prison. When he was subjected to ‘one thousand days of solitary confinement’ during 1985­-89 in Secunderabad Jail, a leading national daily invited him to write about his prison experiences.

While prison writing is a hoary tradition, no writer has had the opportunity to publish his writings from jail. VV, however, did meet the demands placed on him as a writer, despite constraints of censorship by jail authorities and the Intelligence section. He decided to test his creative powers in jail on the touchstone of his readers’ response and expressed himself in a series of thirteen remarkable essays on imprisonment, from prison.

Buying Options
Paperback / Hardback
Ebooks

Varavara Rao

VARAVARA RAO has been a poet, literary critic, public speaker and teacher of language and literature. He is the author of seventeen collections of poetry and nineteen books of prose (including seven books of literary criticism and translation), all in Telugu. The collection of his prison letters, Captive Imagination (2010), was published by Penguin.

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