Event Details

Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
Written by Anne Carson
Reading Designed by Dr. Omkar Bhatkar

The NCPA Library in collaboration with Metamorphosis Theatre and Films

The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in the stunning work, Autobiography of Red. The book is both a novel and a poem, an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.

This reading is designed by Dr. Omkar Bhatkar and uses movement, music and visual aesthetics along with the text. He writes and directs plays and makes independent feature films and documentaries. He has been teaching Film and Aesthetics and involved in theatre making, poetry and cinema for a decade now and hopes to die painting. He is the Artistic Director of Metamorphosis Theatre and Films and the co-founder and Head of St. Andrew’s Centre for Philosophy and Performing Arts.

Admission on a first-come-first-served basis.