Srinagar: The Department of English, University of Kashmir (KU) organised a three-day workshop on creative writing to guide promising writers to hone their writing skills.
A statement of KU issued here said that the workshop was held in a hybrid (online-offline) mode and involved eminent resource persons including Prof Belinder Dhanoa, visiting faculty of creative writing at the School of Culture and Creative Expression, Ambedkar University Delhi, Amal Chatterjee, Senior Course Tutor for the University of Oxford’s Master’s programme in Creative Writing and Farah Bashir, photojournalist, and writer who joined from University of East Anglia, UK.
Forty participants, mainly students and research scholars from the Department of English and a few from other disciplines, joined the workshop which was inaugurated by the Registrar of KU, Nisar Ahmad Mir.
Appreciating the initiative taken by the Department of English, Mir assured the department of full administrative support for all its academic ventures.
Dean School of Arts, Languages and Literatures Prof Adil Amin Kak also spoke on the occasion and congratulated the Department of English for organising the workshop at a time when good writing is in great demand not only in academics but also on online platforms.
In her welcome address, Prof Nusrat Jan, Head of the Department of English and the workshop coordinator highlighted the achievements of the Department and said the present workshop aims at helping and guiding promising writers in honing their writing skills.
“The workshop would provide participants training and discipline required for good writing and enable aspiring writers to find their ‘writerly voice,’” she said.
Prof Dhanoa, in her address, talked about writing as a creative activity that can be learned through proper training, even as she highlighted how workshops can provide opportunities for an exchange of ideas and help foster a community of writers.
The Registrar later also inaugurated the language laboratory recently set up in the Department of English.
Prof Nusrat said that the language lab was a step towards upgrading infrastructural facilities in the Department and would facilitate the teaching of courses in Communicative English, Phonetics, and Linguistics.