Renée Sarojini Saklikar wins a Gold Medal for Bramah and the Beggar Boy
The Independent Publisher Book Awards presents Renée Sarojini Saklikar with the Gold Medal in the Poetry-Specialty category for her book, Bramah and the Beggar Boy.
Bramah and the Beggar Boy is the first book in an epic fantasy series in verse about a female locksmith and an orphan beggar boy who time travel, helping survivors in a world ravaged by climate change. Along the way they use cunning and magic to outwit the evil Consortium and join seed savers and outcasts to confront global disorder.
This epic fantasy series, THOT J BAP: The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns is a bold, innovative saga, influenced by poems such as Homer’s Odyssey, ancient Vedic texts such as the Mahabharata, as well as The Arabian Nights. Traditional poetry forms, such as blank verse and the sonnet combine with news reportage and the science of climate change. Intricately structured, this dystopian fantasy creates a world where ballads and rhymes live with the sharp edges of docu-poetics.
Renée Sarojini Saklikar is a poet and lawyer who lives in Vancouver. She is the author of the ground- breaking poetry book, children of air india, about the bombing of Air India Flight 182 which won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Prize and is the co-author, with Dr. Mark Winston, of the poetry and essay collection, Listening to the Bees, winner of the 2019 Gold Medal Independent Publishers Book Award, Environment/Ecology. She is the curator of the poetry reading series Lunch Poems at SFU and in 2021 curated Vancouver’s first free Poetry Phone, 1-833-POEMS-4-U. Renée Sarojini is an instructor for SFU and VCC and was the first poet laureate for the City of Surrey, (2015-2018). Her work has been adapted for opera, visual art and dance. Her epic fantasy series in verse, THOT J BAP: The Heart Of This Journey Bears All Patterns, is about a female hero battling to save a planet ravaged by climate change.
The Independent Publisher Awards, conducted annually, honors the year's best independently published titles from around the world. The awards are intended to bring increased recognition to the thousands of exemplary independent, university, and self-published books released each year.
The "IPPY" Awards were conceived as a broad-based, unaffiliated awards program open to all members of the independent publishing industry, and are open to authors and publishers worldwide who produce books written in English and appropriate for the North American market.