Nana Patekar to present Goa state cultural awards on Dec 20

Actor Nana Patekar will be the chief guest at Goa State Cultural Awards 2014-15 distribution ceremony here on December 20.
Patekar will give away the awards in the presence of Minister for Art and Culture Dayanand R Mandrekar and the MLA Sidharth Kunkolienkar at the function at Institute of Menezes Braganza Hall, an official release said.
The Directorate of Art and Culture will honour 12 eminent personalities with awards in various categories.
The recipients are: Avdhut Kamat, Ujwala Tarcar and Dr Pradeep Borker (theatre/drama), Joe Rose and Rita Rose (Tiatr), Dilip Borkar and Gurunath V Naik (literature), Rajendra Singbal (Indian music), Leopoldina Figueiredo (western music), Radhakrishna V Shetye and Shiva A Tamankar (bhajan) and Maendra Alvares (fine art/craft).

Hindi poet Ramadarsh Mishra, English writer Cyrus Mistry,
Marathi author Arun Khopkar, Malayalam writer K R Meera and Urdu author Shamim Tariq are among others who were awarded.

The felicitation ceremony was followed by a cultural programme showcasing the 'Raslila and Pung Cholom' dance forms from Manipur.
Other highlights of the 6-day festival, which this year focuses on tribal, oral and northeastern literature included a Tribal Language Poetry festival on the opening day. It saw tribal poets from across the country reciting poems in their native languages, followed by the respective translations in either Hindi or English.
The Akademi, which has its centre for tribal and oral literature in northeastern parts of India, recently opened a new centre in Delhi and will be hosting 'Purvottari,' a writers' meet for authors from north and northeastern India.

The Akademi's annual 'Samvatsar' lecture will be delivered by eminent jurist and Gandhi scholar, Chandrashekhar Dharmadhikari and a three-day national seminar on 'Gandhi, Ambedkar, Nehru: Continuities and Discontinuities' will also be organised, where the relevance of the philosophies of these three builders of modern India will be deliberated upon.
The seminar will be inaugurated by noted scholar Kapila Vatsayan.
A day long symposium on 'Unwritten Languages of India' and a seminar of 'Translational consciousness and literary traditions in India' will run parallel to the festival.
The literary event is expected to see the participation of over 170 writers and literary scholars from across the country including S L Bhyrappa, Bhalachandra Nemade, Gopi Chand Narang, K Satchidanandan, Indra Nath Chaudhuri, Krishna Kumar, Vivek Shanbag, Mahendra Kumar Mishra and Debi Prasad Pattanayak.

The festival will also feature a young writers' festival called 'Yuva Sahiti,' and 'Spin-A-Tale' for children besides a host of cultural performances from different parts of the country like 'Karma Dance' from Odisha and 'Cheraw' or Bamboo Dance from Mizoram.
A qawwali performance by Nizami brothers and a Kathakali rendition of William Shakespeare's 'Othello' will also be part of the festival.
The festival, which began yesterday is set to continue till February 20.