The Earthspinner is travelling

There is exciting news to share.

The Earthspinner is now out in two more languages, finding new readers in countries where English is not the first language. Translations make me very grateful -- such immense dedication from the publishers and especially the translator, in whose words an author's work finds new worlds. I've always wondered whether readers far away, unfamiliar with India, reading in a different language, read almost a different book from the one I've written. I'll never know. I read many books from other languages too and at a recent discussion on translation at the Oxbelly Writer's Retreat from which I am just back, a panel consisting of Fiammetta Rocco, Yukiko Duke, and Chigozie Obioma tackled precisely this question. Their response, and that of the audience, was unanimous: even when translations lose something of the original, they also gain a great deal too, and the book in the new language is a new entity.

In Romanian it is published by Humanitas and is translated by Cristina Nicolae. Humanitas has previously published translations of all my other books, except for Sleeping on Jupiter. Today in Cluj, Romania, there was a book discussion featuring the book. Unfortunately, I could only be there as a video recording. One of the organisers and speakers, Mihaela Gligor, a Romanian scholar specializing in Indian literature, sent the following report:

"The Bookstore posted some pictures: https://www.facebook.com/humanitascj

It was so wonderful!

Some ladies, in their 60s, have a book club and two of them read your novel. So they came prepared and they told us their thoughts.

It was great to see such enthusiasm and the joy of knowing new things about India, and Kumartuli, and small things that bring the two cultures together. They were impressed by your characters, and said that they found something personal in each of them. Doina Borgovan, the other lady that presented the book along with me, works for Radio Cluj and she was impressed to see (in the short movie) that you do pottery and she said that reading your novel she had a feeling that you know what is all about from a very personal perspective :-) And seeing you, she had the confirmation ...

They all loved your message.

Thank you!

It was a great evening"

The book has also been published this week in German by From Luchterhand Verlag, which previously published All the Lives We Never Lived under the title Der Garten meiner Mutter. Both books are translated by Werner Löcher-Lawrence.

HOUSE ON A MOUNTAIN

"...some people have the mountains in them while some have the sea. The ocean exerts an inexorable pull over sea-people wherever they are – in a bright-lit, inland city or the dead centre of a desert – and when they feel the tug there is no choice but somehow to reach it and stand at its immense, earth-dissolving edge, straightaway calmed. Hill-people, even if they are born in flatlands, cannot be parted for long from the mountains. Anywhere else is exile. Anywhere else, the ground is too flat, the air too dense, the trees too broad-leaved for beauty. The colour of the light is all wrong, the sounds nothing but noise." The Folded Earth For three days it had rained as if the sky had turned into a giant shower. It was my third trip to Ranikhet and yet again I was leaving without a glimpse of the high peaks. It didn’t matter. The sound of rain on a tin roof, the dry spells when the hills were honey-coloured in the newly-washed air: who needs more? Then someone sa

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

anuradha roy

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