Apurba Sarma conferred Assam Valley Literary Award

BY Our Staff Reporter

Guwahati, March 6: Eminent litterateur Apurba Sarma was today conferred the prestigious Assam Valley Literary Award for the year 2015.

Instituted by the Williamson Magor Education Trust, the award was presented to Sarma by leading light of Marathi literature Dr Chandrakant Patil.

Apurba Sarma, a former editor of Ajir Asom of The Sentinel group, is a recipient of a number of awards, including the Sahitya Akademi in the year 2000 for creative writing for his collection of short stories Baghe Tapur Rati and the Swar Kamal - tiol Award for the best book in cinema for his book Axomiya Chalachitrar Sa-pohar.

Although fiction is his forte and he has penned numerous critically acclaimed short story collections, Apurba sarma is also recognized as a leading film critic in Assam and has contributed articles to intertiolly renowned film jourls like Deep Focus.

"I take this as a recognition of the lifelong literary pursuit of a humble author," Sarma said upon receiving the award today.

"The urge to write must have come about as a response to psycho-somatic forces and the ego and libido of psychiatrists must surely have played their role too. Those indetermite factors did really bring about the first sprouts of the writer in me," he said, addressing the programme.

He said it is imperative for a writer to be attracted to the inherent appeal and beauty of language right in childhood. A rich language is a writer's bounty, without which he is a destitute, Sarma said.

"An idiom is earned from vast reading and only then can an interlization of the resources of language truly begin. It is this excitement with language which had me write apparently sincere and deliberately literary, otherwise hugely sentimental, long letters to my friends, something perhaps unimagible to the present generation. There was the lurking wish that here is a hint and let my dear ones know my idiom and my playing about with words. But with age, I learnt that writing was not just word-play. It is not simply who says but what is being said that needed to be underlined," Sarma added.