Description
For Nilim Kumar, a poem is “a death born when stones embrace each other.” For me, Nilim Kumar’s poetry is the expression of ideas that flow with intensity powered by articulation and rich imagery. — Damodar Mauzo
Nilim Kumar is a poet of love and loss, of myth and legend, of poems that die and survive, of earth, heaven, hell and beyond. There is a deep and profound lyricism in Nilim’s poems, rarely seen in contemporary poets. — K Satchidanandan
Nilim Kumar is a poet of lyrical epiphany. Playfully he weaves the real in the surreal. But on the whole, his is a high-tide poetry leaping towards the unattainable moon of truth.
— Anamika
Nilim Kumar derives his inspiration from the magnificent and mysterious nature, as well as from the very process of living. His ‘I’ is not the extension of his self but gets transformed into the readers’ ‘I’, thus providing readers ample opportunities to participate and enlarge the horizon of interpretation. — Chandrakant Patil
Nilim Kumar (b 1961) is an Indian poet writing in Assamese. He has published 21 volumes of poetry, three collections of short novels, and other prose writings. He has won several prominent awards, including the Uday Bharati Nation Award, Sabda Award, Raza Foundation Award, Ramanath Bhattacharya Foundation Award, Distinguished Leadership Award (USA), etc. His poems have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, English, Nepali, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, etc. He also has two collections of poems in English translation, and two in Hindi. His poems are taught in Bengaluru University, Gauhati University, Dibrugarh University, and Cotton University. Nilim Kumar has presented his poetry in many national and international poetry festivals. He has also visited France as part of the Indo-French cultural exchange. He lives in Guwahati.
Writer and editor Dibyajyoti Sarma has published three volumes of poetry (the last being Book of Prayers for the Nonbeliever, 2018) and three books of translations (the last being Indira Goswami: Five Novellas about Women, 2021), and two academic books, besides numerous writing credits in edited volumes and journals. He was born in Assam and now lives in Delhi, where he works as a journalist and runs the independent publishing venture Red River.