anuradha roy

The shortlist for the Hindu Literary Award, started last year by India's national newspaper The Hindu , was announced today. The Folded Earth is on the shortlist, in some very good company. Apart from The Folded Earth , the shortlist includes "River of Smoke" by Amitav Ghosh, "The Fakir" (translated from Bengali) by Sunil Gangopadhyay, "Bharatipura" by U.R. Ananthamurthy (translated from Kannada), "Litanies of the Dutch Battery" by N.S. Madhavan (translated from Malayalam), "The Sly Company of People Who Care" by Rahul Bhattacharya, and "The Storyteller of Marrakesh" by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya. The jury received 129 submissions for the award this year. The award will be announced on 30 October in Chennai. More news on The Folded Earth : I will read from the book and answer questions at the Kovalam Literary Festival.which has events in Delhi as well this time. The first Folded Earth session is at 1030 AM on Thurs...

S&S has done a new sampler themed around books that make you travel. You can order it here There are extracts in it from An Atlas of Impossible Longing; and a note on armchair travels: My father’s sister lived in a rambling, many-floored, many-roomed joint family house in the older part of Calcutta and when my brother and I were taken on visits to that house, we entered a different era. Corridors, staircases, terraces, different food smells, caged birds, people, conversations, snatches of songs – we passed all this as we walked up many flights of steep, dark stairs to reach my aunt’s set of rooms. On one of the landings there was a picture of the family’s country home, abandoned because it went permanently under water years ago. This image of a pillared mansion half-submerged by a river kept coming back to me over the years and gradually people—the novel’s  characters— floated up out of its surroundings and An Atlas of Impossible Longing began. When a novel begins I ...

During a recent conversation I had with a Frenchwoman she posed the “what is your favourite book” question in relation to French writers. The only name I could come up with, racking my brains and trying to distract her by asking if she wanted tea, was Michel Houellebecq's Atomised , of which I can't remember a thing except that it had a lot of sex and the sex was minus love because the whole point of the book was that we are all unlinked atoms, incapable of connection, rattling about in the sterile tin that is the cosmos. The Frenchwoman gave me a helpful nudge. “Proust, perhaps?” she suggested, “Would you say you like Remembrance of Things Past ?” After that, having no access to madeleines, we ordered pineapple pastries and changed the subject. One afternoon, creaking up a Ranikhet hillside, I came to a stop when I realised I have no favourite authors or even a favourite book. Worse, there is no author, even among the ones I love, whose every work I have read; not unless for...

It was lovely to find that Jillian, of the Delirious Kitchen blog, read An Atlas of Impossible Longing  and concocted out of it.... a mango chutney! You can look up the recipe her e and her blog here . I know the feeling -- that need for a deep red glass of good wine, softly ageing camembert cheese and herbed olives that charges at you exactly five and a quarter pages into A Year in Provence . Miles away from both in Ranikhet, I saved myself pain and shut the book on the sixth page -- but Jillian's is a better solution. Talking of chutneys, an eighty-plus writer I knew used to sit out in a square of sun in front of his cottage and drink gin and lime. A glass jar with decaying pieces of lime stood on the window sill next to him and he claimed it was lime pickle in the process of being made: each time he squeezed drops of lime into his gin, he tossed the used piece into the jar, sprinkled a bit of salt over it and shut the lid. Sure enough, a few months of perseverance led to a w...

It is a pastoral idyll within the squalor of East Delhi: a cool lake, patches of purple water hyacinth, ferny leaves overhead and twisted fingers of keekar below. An egret contemplates its dinner on a little island halfway across. On the other bank, a line of full moons have dipped from the sky to the ground. Except that the full moons have trousers bunched below them and what they are doing is releasing into the water the odoriferous still-lifeform known as Turdus giganticus . Delhi has the overwrought elegance of Nehru Park and the ancient stone grandeur of Lodi Gardens. And far away from the bureaucrats and embassies, it has Sanjay Gandhi Park. This is a seven kilometre park that begins in Mayur Vihar and ends in Trilokpuri, linking middle-class Delhi with the urban badlands that terrify the middle-class. I began going to the park when a curly-tailed puppy adopted me. The park was an enormous stretch of wilderness from which paths were being hacked out. It had a sparklin...

My companion in the bus that morning reached her stop, still chattering of Would-be. She said smiling, “Tomorrow I’ll bring you a card; you must come for my wedding!” I got off two stops later, and walked towards Father Joseph’s office, feeling disembodied, weakened and sleepy, as if I would be compelled to sit on the pavement and then not know how to get up again. I found myself outside a hotel painted pink and yellow, and walked through its gates to a swimming pool at the back. There was a sheltered staircase next to the pool. I sat on one of its steps, before the shining blue emptiness of the water, the stretch of green tiles around it, the damp towel discarded on a chair. There was a line of plate-glass windows on the other side that produced mirror images of everything I saw. A bird passed overhead, low enough for its shadow to ripple across us. At the other end of the pool, a little girl was being urged by a swimming coach to plunge from the diving board. She shoute...

1) Can you tell us about yourself? What can I say about myself? As a child I lived all over India because my father was a field geologist and this work made him move around a lot. Thirty or forty years ago when phones and television and internet had not connected everyone, moving from one part of India to another was like moving to another country. The language, food, culture, architecture: everything changed totally. I went to many schools, then moved to Calcutta for college and then to Cambridge for university — so I have roots everywhere and nowhere and am an insider and outsider simultaneously anywhere I find myself. It was only when I began working at a publisher’s office in Delhi that I first spent a long stretch of time in one place and now I live with my husband and dog partly in a tiny town in the hills and partly in Delhi. 2) When and how did you get the taste for writing ? What did your write first? I’ve written stories ever since I can remember. I published my first...