anuradha roy

The shortlist for the Hindu Literary Award, started last year by India's national newspaper The Hindu , was announced today. The Folded Earth is on the shortlist, in some very good company. Apart from The Folded Earth , the shortlist includes "River of Smoke" by Amitav Ghosh, "The Fakir" (translated from Bengali) by Sunil Gangopadhyay, "Bharatipura" by U.R. Ananthamurthy (translated from Kannada), "Litanies of the Dutch Battery" by N.S. Madhavan (translated from Malayalam), "The Sly Company of People Who Care" by Rahul Bhattacharya, and "The Storyteller of Marrakesh" by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya. The jury received 129 submissions for the award this year. The award will be announced on 30 October in Chennai. More news on The Folded Earth : I will read from the book and answer questions at the Kovalam Literary Festival.which has events in Delhi as well this time. The first Folded Earth session is at 1030 AM on Thurs

S&S has done a new sampler themed around books that make you travel. You can order it here There are extracts in it from An Atlas of Impossible Longing; and a note on armchair travels: My father’s sister lived in a rambling, many-floored, many-roomed joint family house in the older part of Calcutta and when my brother and I were taken on visits to that house, we entered a different era. Corridors, staircases, terraces, different food smells, caged birds, people, conversations, snatches of songs – we passed all this as we walked up many flights of steep, dark stairs to reach my aunt’s set of rooms. On one of the landings there was a picture of the family’s country home, abandoned because it went permanently under water years ago. This image of a pillared mansion half-submerged by a river kept coming back to me over the years and gradually people—the novel’s  characters— floated up out of its surroundings and An Atlas of Impossible Longing began. When a novel begins I bare