Revathy Gopal
Keki Daruwalla, in the Hindu Literary Review, about Revathy’s book and the struggle that went into getting it published:
I had met her first when she won the second prize at the All India Poetry Competition organised by the British Council and the Poetry Society. (She was to win that prize twice). She then sent me some fine stories. The Sahitya Akademi decided to publish her in a scheme where authors with exceptional first books get published (just one author a year). But this applies to only authors under 40, and she, born in 1947, was way beyond that. The book had to be withdrawn from the press. Revathy went to a Mumbai publisher who asked for Rs. 35,000. She sent her mauscript to Ravi Dayal, but Ravi died tragically, also of cancer. Eventually Prof. P. Lal (God bless him) of the Writer’s Workshop came to her rescue, as he has with over a thousand poets and playwrights.One has mentioned all this to show what travails a poet has to go through to get a book out. Things will not get better till people learn to buy poetry as opposed to merely writing it.
