For each episode of 5 Objects, we ask a guest to choose five pieces or items that have influenced their intellectual life and work. These can be books, art, music, poetry, photographs, performance, a person, an event, or an experience. The choices then become the basis of a free-flowing conversation that discusses our guest’s life, their personal, political and intellectual journeys and histories. For this episode, Suchitra Vijayan spoke to Naveen Kishore, Publisher of Seagull Books. Naveen chose relationships, generosity of risk, vulnerability, free fall, and anti-algorithm.
Naveen Kishore, a theater practitioner, founded Seagull Books in 1982, beginning with the New Indian Playwrights series, which translated the work of regional Indian dramatists into English. Under Kishore’s direction, Seagull has since published English translations of more than 500 books by major African, European, Asian, and Latin American writers, including works by Nobel Prize winners Mo Yan, Herta Müller, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Man Booker International Prize winner László Krasznahorkai.