Mon 23 Nov 6.30 pm The Nehru Centre , 8 South Audley Street, London, W1K 1HF

The Ray Memorial Lecture : On Ray and Ghatak and Other Filmmaking Pairs: The Structure of Asian Modernity

Regarded as one of the greatest auteurs of 20th century, Satyajit Ray was drawn into filmmaking after meeting Jean Renoir and viewing the Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves during a visit to London. He directed thirty-seven films, including feature films and documentaries. A fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, graphic designer and critic, Ray's first film, Pather Panchali won eleven international prizes at the Cannes film festival. He did the scripting, casting, scoring, cinematography, art direction, editing and designed his own credit titles and publicity material. Ray received many major awards in his career, including 32 Indian National Film Awards, a number of awards at international film festivals and award ceremonies, and an Academy Honorary Award in 1992.

Author of novels, short stories, poems and critical essays in English, Amit Chaudhuri has been Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Leverhulme Fellow at Cambridge University, Visiting Professor at Columbia University, and Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Freie University, Berlin. His novels have won several major awards and he has received international critical acclaim. He is also an acclaimed Indian classical musician, and an internationally recognised singer and composer of Indo-Western experimental music, with an album from each of these genres. Currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, he was included in the panel for the Man Booker International Prize 2009, alongside writer Jane Smiley and essayist Andrey Kurkov. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Chair : Chandak Sengoopta, Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, is a member of the Executive Committee of the Satyajit Ray Foundation UK. He has written many articles on Ray and is now working on The Three Worlds of Satyajit Ray, a comprehensive study of the local, national and international contexts that shaped Ray’s career. In association with the Satyajit Ray Foundation UK.