In Conversation with Ameena Hussein at the Jaipur Literature Festival, March 8th, 2022

I have the huge privilege of being in conversation about the Earthspinner with the brilliant Sri Lankan writer and publisher Ameena Hussein at the Jaipur Literature Festival. The session is on 8th March, at 1230 pm IST, at the Mughal Tent, available online.

It's fabulous to be talking to each other again about a new book. We were in conversation in 2016 too, in Galle, Sri Lanka, where we met. I found her one of the most interesting and lively conversationalists about literature I've encountered.

I loved Ameena's own new book, IBN BATTUTA IN SRI LANKA.

It is an effortless intertwining of history, family memoir, travelogue. The spread of Islam in the second century meant hospitable networks worldwide, enabling Ibn Battuta to travel far and wide, including to SL. With a blend of very engaging detective work, map reading and travel, Ameena reconstructs Ibn Battuta’s journeys in her country. Tongue-in-cheek vignettes place modern day Sri Lanka against the past: where places rich with ebony, cinnamon, pearl fishing, and ship-building have become towns of “used car dealers and good looking tuition masters. young men with winsome smiles and names like Jagath Sir or Dushy Master”.

One particular passage made me think how THE EARTHSPINNER and her book were in some way connected: “We passed Kudirimalai Point, which today is reduced to a narrow headland overlooking the sea. We made a short stop to investigate the ruins of the reportedly massive equine sculpture that had stood on the headland and is now in the vicinity of a navy camp. Remains of a large hoof, covered with shrubs and thorn bushes, the only sign that a huge horse sculpture ever existed, looked out over an expanse of sea.”

I hope very much you will tune in to our conversation.

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...

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 ...

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...

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