A Literary Festival at the Victoria Memorial, Kolkata: KALAM

I was born in Calcutta (as it was called then) yet by some quirk of fate, I've never done a book event there, not even a bookshop reading. So this is very exciting.

The complete programme of the festival is here. It runs from 25th to 29th January. All the events are at the Victoria Memorial, a spectacular setting.
It will be balmy and sunny and festive at this time of year.

No passes are required, all the events are free.

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

Escaping the Solitude of the Writing Life Through Letters

In April this year, I turned the key in the door of an apartment on the tenth floor of a grey building and walked into an ocean of light and sky. A bare, enormous room with white floors and walls, a few pieces of furniture including a brown couch in an advanced state of infirmity. The eastern wall was entirely glass—sliding doors from floor to ceiling, leading out into a balcony overlooking an endless stretch of water where the Loire met the Atlantic. Seagulls swooped past the window to the lighthouse nearby. The apartment felt like a ship—nothing but water on every side. Holding on to the balcony’s banister and looking at the sheer drop downward, I saw Icarus tumbling through the burning sky. The manager of my first-ever writing residency handed me a single sheet of paper before she left. “Dear Anuradha Roy,” it began, “I am writing you these words to wish you a warm welcome in Saint-Nazaire. I hope you will find inspiration in the contrasting sceneries of this port c

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