JUST PUBLISHED: THE FOLDED EARTH

IN A REMOTE TOWN IN THE HIMALAYA, Maya tries to put behind her a time of great sorrow. By day she teaches in a school and at night she types up drafts of a magnum opus by her landlord, a relic of princely India known to all as Diwan Sahib. Her bond with the eccentric scholar, and her friendship with a village girl, Charu, seem to offer her the chance of a new life in Ranikhet, where lush foothills meet clear skies.

As Maya finds out, no refuge is remote or small enough. The world she has come to love, where people are connected with nature, is endangered by the town’s new administration. The impending elections are hijacked by powerful outsiders who sow division and threaten the future of her school. Charu begins to behave strangely, and Maya soon understands that a new boy in the neighbourhood may be responsible for changes in her friend. When Diwan Sahib’s nephew arrives to set up his trekking company on their estate, she is drawn to him despite herself, but his disappearances into the mountains evoke painful echoes of the past.

By turn poetic, elegiac and comic, this is a many-layered and powerful narrative about characters struggling with their pasts, a novel that poignantly reveals the strange shapes that India’s religious and social conflicts can assume even on distant mountaintops.

The Folded Earth was published in February 2011 in the UK (MacLehose Press) and India (Hachette). Read an interview about the book here

All the Lives We Never Lived wins the Sahitya Akademi Award 2022

Anuradha Roy bags coveted Sahitya Akademi Award, 22 others feted Anuradha Roy bagged the coveted Sahitya Akademi Award on Thursday. The author of 'All The Lives We Never Lived ' was felicitated along with 22 other authors for their exemplary contribution in the field of literature. This is the fourth book penned by the 40-something Roy. This book also won the prestigious Tata Book of the Year Award for Fiction in 2018. The book revolves around the life and times of a horticulturalist Myshkin, who narrates his life story, and his unending wait for letters from etters from the mother who abandoned him, for greener pastures in another country. Roy, who lives in Ranikhet, has previously written 'An Atlas of Impossible Longing', 'The Folded Earth' and 'Sleeping on Jupiter' which won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016. It was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in the year 2015. Read more at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ma

Language, Lost and Found

In France for a long spell earlier this year, everyone around me speaking in a language I didn’t speak or read, I began to think about the many streams of language I've swum in. My mother tongue, Bengali, was the language of home and of intimacy. Yet somewhere along those years, with a sigh drowned out by babel, the language had left me. I tried to find my way back to it through writers like Leela Majumdar and Bibhutibhushan. In "Language, Lost and Found" out now in Noema Magazine, I write of how I found it again, and of language in alien contexts. I'm not sure if this essay is travelogue or memoir or a bunch of stories. But here it is, and I hope you will read it. It was a red paperback with a green, winking cat spread across its large front. Just a few taps pulls it up on my screen now, and I wonder if my mental image of the day my father came with it as a gift for my brother and me is the work of memory or imagination. He walks in as if he has a happy secret and l

Ten years of Anuradha Roy’s ‘An Atlas of Impossible Longing’: What the writer and publisher remember ‘For three years, it was an alternative, secret universe in which I lived, awake or asleep.’ On serendipity and the difficult road to getting published: Anuradha Roy, writer Read this in Scroll.in Christopher MacLehose and Anuradha Roy. Photograph by Rukun Advani An Atlas of Impossible Longing started in one of those “dummy books” – blank pages, hardbound – that binderies used to make to establish accurately the spine width of books that they would bind for a publisher. The publishing house was one my partner and I had recently set up. It had no capital but our savings, no office, and the only books as yet were dummies with blank pages. Because I still have that notebook, I know I wrote the first section of Atlas in pencil, in a non-stop scrawl that poured out without warning. It went on for a few pages and then came to a stop, after which the notebook

anuradha roy

Search This Blog