Description
In the pages, I hear Vinay’s voice, the timbre and modulation. It is an unforgettable tone. Offering the sense — or illusion — of a world that challenges accepted meanings. Unexpectedly, I hear a submerged conversation offstage you might say — since the poet is a director of plays. The ideas, statement, voices, and goals converge to form a studied repetition, a kind of chorus. I continue to encounter this rhythm as I watch the dynamics of each poem play their part. I discover the underlying structure. Facial expressions, tone of voice, hand gestures, body language rising through the black and white of the page — they’ve all converged, orchestrated created an effect that goes beyond the everyday, the effect that Vinay creates with his productions. This is a collection that has been years in the creation. Now the time has come for the curtain to rise and words to take centre stage and hold their audience spellbound. — Anjana Basu
Edgy and contemporarily centripetal, Vinay Sharma’s poetry whirls shards of experience and words into the refreshing kaleidoscopic vistas of Love. His voice expertly bandies itself between earnestness and irony. The impromptu feel one gets in some of the poems in If you can slip out of your face is the masterly hand moulding philosophical rumination into the urgency of a scrapbook notation, a response to stimuli. — Debasish Lahiri
Kolkata-based actor, theatre director, playwright, Vinay Sharma, active in Indian theatre for over four decades, is known for his innovative and alternative work in post-modern theatre and is currently Artistic Director at Padatik Theatre where he has directed, written, and designed numerous plays in Hindi and English. He is also known for co-writing, co-directing, and composing music and songs for 17 plays for children from 1987-2003 at Happy Hours: an alternative education program for children. His film works include Mantra (2005, dir Rabi Ranjan Maitra), Krishnakali (2007, dir Amol Palekar), Lost (2022, dir Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury) and the web series Chemistry Mashi (2024. dir Swarup Chakraborty). He has adapted in Hindi and directed the classics Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray as audiobooks for Amazon Audible. Vinay’s theatre writings, short fiction and poetry have featured in various journals including Seagull Theatre Quarterly, TLM – the little magazine, Prosopisia, Hakara Journal, EKL Review and Syncopation Literary Journal. He was shortlisted for the TLM-New Writing Award (2006) and the Bridport International Poetry Prize (2017). He is currently at work on his first novel.