Prantik Banerjee’s poem, Stand Alone, bagged the first prize along with a cash prize of INR 50,000 at the Wingword Poetry Competition 2025, an online poetry competition to showcase creativity and expression from across India. We interviewed him to know more about the inspiration and philosophy behind his poems.
Prantik Banerjee teaches his students to romance with language and literature. He encourages young minds to break rules because he believes that you cannot be creative unless you are a habitual rule-breaker. When not doing his ‘class’ act, he pens stories, poems, articles, essays, and other stuff @printable/unprintable.
The Journal of Poetry Society of India, PEN International, Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), Brown Critique, Little Magazine, Stanza, Kavya Bharati, and e-zines have risked publishing his stuff. A Postscript on Missing Keys and Crossing the Line (both published by Writers Workshop, Kolkata) are his two poetry books. His poems have been shortlisted 3 times in the All India Poetry Competition held by the British Council, India. He was featured as “Poet of the Fortnight’ by the Sahitya Akademi Award winner, the late Kamala Das.
During the pandemic years, he erased the lead of several HB pencils in writing short stories that got published as The Keeper of the Dead. Occasionally, he clears his head by writing pieces in long form on viruses, Google babies, comics, cyborgs, chicklit, films, and other things that we call ‘pop culture’. These books, despite the new virus of cancel culture, are passed as textbooks and reference reading for university students, teachers, and researchers.
He is often invited as a speaker to conferences and has delivered endowment talks at the University of Rochester (USA), Loyola College (Chennai), Christ University (Bengaluru), and other universities and colleges. During odd hours, he loves to be footloose and fancy free. He frequently travels to places where he can find buried stories and forgotten histories.
You’ve said that one cannot be truly creative without being a habitual rule-breaker. Yet, literature often operates within traditions and inherited forms. How do you reconcile the tension between reverence for literary lineage and the irreverence of breaking away from it?
Literature is a site where tradition and individual talent are often engaged in a tug-of-war between critical acceptance and outright rebellion. In my opinion, the best writing occurs, however, when there is a handshake between the two, after the heat and dust of conflict are purified by the alchemy of the writer’s imagination. It is, I believe, with the loom of time that a writer knots these two contrasting threads to weave the fabric of creativity.
As a writer and a teacher, I have had my fair share of training in the English literary tradition—a deep and extensive reading of the classics as well as the moderns. This schooling with the best that has been thought and said is a necessary step before declaring one’s own creative independence. By that I mean, one needs to first have a very thorough grounding in the rules (here, the underlying principles, history of ideas, trends, and movements) of past literary traditions before unfurling the flag of freedom; only then can one break free of tradition and discover one’s signature style.
At the same time, the newness or originality of the voice does not entail a complete severing of ties with tradition. In fact, tradition is forever there, hovering like Caesar’s ghost over one’s writing. It is in the conscious (sometimes, unconscious) invoking of past masters and the simultaneous exorcizing of them that you find your writing. Indeed, the best of writers are those who work with and beyond tradition.
In The Keeper of the Dead, born out of the pandemic years, you turned isolation into an act of storytelling. Looking back, do you see the pandemic as having fundamentally altered not just your writing process but also your conception of what literature should do in times of collective crisis?
Storytelling is the way in which writers think and respond to crises, both personal and collective. When “the time is out of joint”, a writer tries to find imaginative expressions that speak to a pathology of fear and uncertainty. The COVID-19 pandemic also challenged me to understand and respond to a traumatic event. As a writer, I initially struggled to relate the ‘new normal’ to the ‘normal’ language of writing. With time, the struggle to make sense of what was happening to us mutated into an attempt to reinvent language: to find ways to unlearn the normalcy of words and create a new idiom for the altered reality. It seemed to me that the virulence of the virus had to be cured by the vaccine of new metaphors.
And how well did writers do that! Writers responded to the life-altering event not just as witnesses but as healers. They gave hope, courage, and solace to humanity in the midst of so much loss and suffering. Personally, the lockdown gave me a new understanding of the changed landscape and mindscape. The stories I wrote, like ‘The Drip’ and ‘Fish out of Water’ for The Keeper of the Dead, were lived as well as imagined responses to the collective crisis.
You mentioned the “virus of cancel culture,” but also noted that your pop culture writings have been used as university reference texts. Do you believe literature’s role today is primarily to resist the erasures of culture, whether by algorithms, censorship, or historical forgetting? Or is its role more intimate, more personal?
That’s a very good question! The role of literature for me is not either or. Good writing, I think, merges the personal with the public, the individual with society. In any age, writers write both as custodians of culture and sentinels of change. In their writings, they articulate the spirit of the time. There is a difference, nevertheless, in their ways of doing so. Some writers write to connect with readers in an intimate and personal way; others write to fulfill their social responsibility. But the twin roles are not mutually exclusive. Both contribute in their unique ways to resist the forgetting of culture and to drive away the vultures of ‘cancel culture’. To prevent the decline of art, literature, and culture in any age is the moral responsibility of a writer.
So I wrote poems, short stories, and long-form essays to do what a writer must do—be true to his vocation, be true to himself.
How did you hear about the Wingword Poetry Competition?
I read about the Wingword Poetry Competition on the internet.
How do you select pieces to submit in competitions? What was your behind-the-scenes process for submitting poems to Wingword?
Frankly, I am not a ‘compulsive competitor’ in poetry competitions! I don’t shoot off my poems to every call for submission. I am not entirely convinced of poetry prizes, although I am now a winner with a purse of Rs 50000/- (and I am extremely happy)!
In the case of the Wingword competition, I did look at the poems that have won prizes in various categories in previous editions before sending three of mine for 2025. What I liked was that Wingword erases the hierarchy of languages and democratizes the space for poets. I immensely enjoyed reading the poems of writers from different parts of India and abroad, and in different languages.
As for my selection, I submitted Stand Alone, the winning entry of Wingword Competition 2025 in the Main Category, because I thought it spoke for and to the silences of many.
Sincere words of a sincere writer towards literature, and especially towards his poems. The way he weaved together the humanistic sensitivity in Stand Alone along with a metaphorical strength of a poem that can withstand the assailment of peace-despising crowd, and the way he has frankly opened up his heart here about breaking away the traditions of literature (resist the forgetting of culture and to drive away the vultures of ‘cancel culture’), truly reflects the gentleness of his heart and the nerve of a rebel in his mind. Truly inspirational….and worthy!
The interview was an interesting read. Having read some of your works, your honesty and sincerity show up all across, staring at the reader, and impossible to ignore. You have a very distinct personal perspective, style and flair. You write for your own creative urge and satisfaction, which is most important. In this journey you are creating your own niche followers and pray that their ranks swell.