anuradha roy

  RAISING HARE by CHLOE DALTON, Reviewed in Biblio, October 2025   On an icy February morning during the pandemic, Chloe Dalton pulled on coat, boots and gloves, and set off for a walk – without an inkling that her entire way of being was about to be transformed. As she strolled through the fields around her home, a restored barn in the English countryside, she came to an abrupt halt: there was a tiny creature, smaller than her palm, sheltering on the ribbon of grass that ran down the centre of the rutted track. A leveret. “The word surfaced in my mind, even though I had never seen a baby hare before”. She left it there, not wishing to interfere, but when she saw it immobile in the same spot four hours later, she knew she could not abandon it to die.   Published last year to great acclaim, Raising Hare shows how caring for an animal can unmake and remake us. In ‘Auguries of Innocence’, William Blake, seeing the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, ...

  Towards the end of the Mahabharata, the five Pandavas and Draupadi renounce their kingdom, wear clothes of bark and begin the arduous walk to Mount Meru. Only the most righteous gain heaven, and this is their goal. During their long walk, a stray dog tags along, as strays tend to do. One by one, each of the Pandavas drops dead because each has a flaw that makes them unfit for heaven. Only Yudhishthira, son of Dharma, reaches the gates of Heaven — with the dog. They are met by Indra, who welcomes Yudhishthira in, but tells him to leave the dog behind: “Dogs disrupt sacrifices and offerings, make them impure. You abandoned your wife and brothers on the journey. Now abandon the dog!” To this, Yudhishthira says he would rather give up heaven than a loyal friend: “This dog is alive and has taken refuge with me. I will not abandon one who is devoted to me. That would be a sin equal to killing a woman... READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE

I spent most of May and a part of June at the De Pure Fiction residency in a tiny, isolated hamlet in the Occitanie in France. To write about the place and what it did to my work and to me will take time -- to reflect, to let things settle. Meanwhile, Isabelle Desesquelles, the French novelist who runs the residency, asked me a set of questions before I left, and has posted it on the blog with watercolours I painted while I was there. La Lettre #36 _______________ Anuradha Roy a publié cinq romans. Elle a résidé à la maison De Pure Fiction en ce printemps pour son prochain livre et depuis, les chevreuils, les oiseaux - rouge-gorge familier, huppe fasciée, pivert, coucou - les lézards verts, les libellules bleues, les papillons semblent s’être mis eux aussi à la lecture, la cherchant sous les pétales d’un coquelicot ou au travers du feuillage des oliviers. Peut-être même, tous, envisagent-ils de faire le voyage jusqu’en Inde et l'Himalaya où Anuradha Roy vit, ...

    It's been a long road with the translation, from October 2020 when the process began, to now. Publishers and writers have to be persevering and patient individuals. I'm very grateful to Qin Yang, Literary Editor at Horizon Books, who came across the book during an event I did at the Jaipur Literature Festival, decided to read it, then championed its cause and convinced Horizon to take it on. She and translator Tan Xueran took infinite care of the work, getting in touch about tiny details and nuances of language. Orhan Pamuk, Peter Handke and Louise Glück were published at Horizon long before they were awarded their Nobels, Qin had told me at the start. I'm very happy to be in their company in the Horizon list and hope some of the gold dust from the greats falls on this book.

  Once a week around midday, Maulvi Sah’b would come in through the gates of our school in Hyderabad and class would divide briskly into two and troop off to different parts of the building. Those who were Muslim would be at religious instruction classes with him for the next half hour while the others trudged through moral science lessons. Something similar happened during language classes. We would hear a singsong chorus of “A-salaam-aleikum, Aunty”, from the Urdu classroom as we sat at our Sanskrit or Telugu lessons. Through my nomadic childhood, I’ve been at many schools. None exemplified the idea of secular India as intensely as this Muslim school in Hyderabad. Begum Anees Khan, who made it so, died in Hyderabad on August 16. Her passing feels symbolic, as if it signifies the death of a quixotic idea.  Anees Khan was not given to seeking the limelight or making speeches. She never spelled out her secularism. It was instinctive: instead of words, there was act...

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 Human...