Disappearing August

I realised today that it's the last day of August and I hadn't posted anything all this month, partly because there has been too much design work for our publishing house, Permanent Black. Also, unusually for me, I actually did one reading this month and am getting ready for another next month. The first was at SAP, in Delhi. SAP is a giant international software company and believe it or not, one of the perks it offers its employees is a book club. I've never heard of something like this. Perks to employees are usually fancy luggage and smartphones at the end of each year or anything else that can be clearly and easily quantified. But books?

Anyway, they have this book club, to which they bring authors to speak, read, meet. I was quite intimidated at the thought of a roomful of bright young computer engineers, but they turned out to be sympathetic and attentive, plus sure of what they demanded of a book (a gripping story, characters they could empathise with, a sense that the book would shut out the world) and full of curiosity about writing and publishing.

The next event will be an interesting one because I am doing it with the translator Arunava Sinha. Arunava has translated (last counted) 14 Bengali books into English, among which is Chowringhee, which was shortlisted for UK's Independent Foreign Fiction Award, a hugely prestigious prize. Arunava and I will talk about our work with each other and with the audience and there will be a brief reading from An Atlas of Impossible Longing in French and then in English. It'll be informal and anecdotal. This event is organised by the French Embassy and the Alliance Francaise and the details are in this card. It is open to all.

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

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