Book to feature unpublished writings of literary great A K Ramanujan

Unpublished writings of one of India's greatest poets, folklorists and scholars A K Ramanujan that are being preserved and catalogued at the University of Chicago will be featured in a new book next year.

The book Journeys will be edited by son Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodriguez, who has authored a book on the poet-scholar.

It will feature excerpts from Ramanujan's personal diaries and journals, providing a window into his creative process. It will also include literary entries from his travels, his thoughts on writing, poetry drafts, and dreams. His diaries and journals provided fodder for much of his published work.

Among his vast body of work, Ramanujan (1929-1993) translated ancient Tamil and medieval Kannada poetry, as well as UR Ananthamurthy's novel "Samskara".

A modernist poet, he produced four poetry collections in English during his lifetime, and had intended to publish the journals he had kept throughout the decades.

After his premature death 25 years ago, his journals, diaries, papers and other documents - spanning 50 years from 1944 to 1993 - were given by his family to the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago in June 1994.

The book will be published by Penguin Random House (PRH) India in 2019.

Ranjana Sengupta, associate publisher (literary publishing) at PRH India excited about publishing the "papers of a poet, scholar and thinker as eminent as A K Ramanujam". '