Category: Books

So another Indian gets the Booker Prize. What shall we feel, smug or smart? Being Indian is tough enough. Being an Indian writer in English is tougher. And being an Indian writer in English who has won the Booker is the toughest business of them all. So hail the Thane of London’s Guildhall, who shall be the Queen hereafter!  If we look at the beginnings of our efforts at writing in English, it would be amusing to note how Indians…

He won the Sahitya Akademi award way back in 1991 and is the author of novels such as Hero, The Brainfever Bird, Trotternama, which won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, and The Everest Hotel, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Irwin Allan Sealy speaks to Sayandeb Chowdhury about his latest novel, Red, which was launched in Mumbai last week.   You once wanted to be a painter. And finally, there is a book about Matisse.  Oh yes. I wanted to be very early in my life. But I…

His novel, Shadow Lines, had made Khushwant Singh exult, ‘this is how a story should be told, this is how a novel should be written’. Amitav Ghosh is now in the uppermost echelons of Indian writing and can confidently claim to be a world-novelist. His last book The Hungry Tide won the Hutch Crossword Award in 2004 in the best Indian English novel category. He was in Mumbai recently to announce the shortlist for this year’s awards. Sayandeb Chowdhury spoke to him about his novels,…

Few works go beyond the obvious and remain entrenched in the history of a people Does it ever happen that a single book defines an entire nation? In its sweep, in its expanse, in its narration or its intent? Maybe only rarely. The ancients had a vision which, simply put, was epic. Nations merged into narrations and narrations defined nations. Iliad, Aeneid, Mahabharata, Divine Comedy – literary coliseums – in front of which generations stood, dwarfed and awestruck. But not anymore. The idea of a…