Tartan and Turban

About the Book: 

Let the powder clouds of Holi - the festival of colour - cover you in purple, pink and green.
Be mesmerised by the proud hooded cobra weaving its charm.
Join a wedding wrapped up in reams of yellow silk and incense and alive with the swish of green kilts and the sound of bagpipes.
Watch the snow melt on the crest of soft dawns and feel the slash of rain against your numb cheek as the wind races across from the North Sea.

Read Bashabi Fraser's poetry and experience a swirl of emotions and images.

A Bengali poet living in Scotland, Bashabi Fraser creatively spans the different worlds she inhabits, celebrating the contrasts of the two countries whilst also finding commonality. Focussing on clear themes and issues - displacement, removal, belonging, identity, war - her poetry is vibrant with feeling and comes alive in an outrageous game of sound patterns.

Reviews: 

Bashabi's lyrical and evocative verses... touch a chord with all those who hear her. THE SUNDAY STATESMAN, Calcutta

Two cultures, two worlds and a writer who can span them both. VALERIE BIERMAN

About the Author:

BASHABI FRASER was born in West Bengal in India. Living a multicultural and colourful life, Bashabi divides her life between the two countries she loves most – India and Britain. After living in London, Bashabi returned to India to attend a convent boarding school on the Himalayas where she was threatened with expulsion after breaking all possible rules! Happily this threat never came to fruition and with a PhD in English Literature, she is now an associate lecturer in English Literature for the Open University and a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies at Edinburgh University. She travels widely working as a poet, attending councils and conferences around the world and has written for many publications, has two collections of poems in print and has been included in a number of anthologies. Bashabi has also written children’s stories and is writing a shadow puppet play and a book on the Bengal Partition and is a classical Indian dancer and choreographer. She now lives in Edinburgh with her husband and daughter.