anuradha roy

PUBLISHED TODAY IN INDIA (Hachette) PUBLISHING IN BRITAIN AND EUROPE ON 31 MAY 2018 (Maclehose Press) PUBLISHING IN THE USA AND CANADA   (Simon Schuster/ Atria Books) ON 20 NOVEMBER 2018  PUBLISHING IN SRI LANKA IN SUMMER 2018  (Perera-Husain) Translations into German, Russian, Romanian, French coming soon War, nationalism, and trees shape lives in unforeseeable ways in this novel about a family and a country struggling with enormous transformations. ‘In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman’ – so begins the story of Myshkin and his mother, Gayatri, who is driven to rebel against tradition and follow her artist’s instinct for freedom. Freedom of a different kind is in the air across India. The fight against British rule is reaching a critical turn. The Nazis have come to power in Germany. At this point of crisis, two strangers arrive in Gayatri’s town, opening up to her the vision o...

(Published in The Guardian, 17th April 2018) A chilling leitmotif of Nordic crime fiction is a child leaving home to play, never to return. Detectives search out trails pointing to sexual violence and murder, and by degrees it becomes clear that the crime is not isolated: it is the symptom of a damaged community. The abduction, gang-rape, and murder in India of eight-year-old Asifa Bano reveals such damage on a terrifying scale. It shows that the slow sectarian poison released into the country’s bloodstream by its Hindu nationalists has reached full toxicity. Where government statistics say four rapes are reported across the country every hour, sexual assault is no longer news. Indian minds have been rearranged by the constant violence of their surroundings. Crimes against women, children and minority communities are normalised enough for only the most sensational to be reported. The reasons Asifa’s ordeal has shaken a nation exhausted by brutality are four. The vi...

Published in The Wire, 13th April 2018 Who among us today, if we were born Hindu, does not have at least one relative or acquaintance who hates Muslims? Who among us does not have friends – men and women thought to be moral and humane – that have closed their eyes to the brutal amorality of the ruling regime, seeing it instead as the political road to India’s salvation? Will they be able to carry on unchanged even now, after the people they voted in have sprung to the defence of the rapists and murderers of an eight-year-old? Will they fail even now to see that a girl of that age is neither Hindu nor Muslim but only a child? The barbarism of victorious armies was meant to have been over and done with, and the founding of the League of Nations after the First World War came with the liberal belief – shattered by the Nazis – that civilised life was more or less inevitable. In the India where I grew up, the exploitative British regime was over, it was post-Nehru, a countr...

(The Telegraph, Wednesday April 25th 2018) On the morning of 24 th January we woke to white: it must have snowed steadily through the night for the trees to be so laden and for our surroundings to acquire such a hushed stillness. From our windows we could see that every range between us and the Trishul and Nanda Devi had changed colour. It was the first snow of the season, and the first sign of any moisture in months. Two days later, walking in the forest, I came upon a rhododendron scarlet with flowers. At the foot of the tree was a hollow with snow still ankle-deep, as were many sheltered parts of the forest that saw little sun through the day. To find rhododendron in flower in deep winter is as strange in these hills as sighting a peacock. Soon, reports began to appear about the early flowering of the Rhododendron arboretum all over the western Himalaya. It appeared that my tree-in-a-hurry was not the only one to bloom ahead of time, rising temperatures meant that trees...

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 ...

One of the stories my mother often narrated in our childhood, my brother’s and mine, was that of Grandma Moses. In my mother’s telling, Grandma Moses grew up as a farm hand, became a farmer’s wife, raised a big family, faced the loneliness and difficulties of widowhood from her mid-sixties, renewed her interest in painting at that time, and was ‘discovered’ by the art world in her late-seventies. The crucial part of the Moses story for my mother, I think, is that a self-taught, single, woman artist with no professional scaffolding found a life in the world of art at a very late age. Married at 26, widowed at 49, my mother had found herself living a nomadic life after my father, a field geologist, entered her life. She gave up working. Moving from place to place with two children and a husband who developed a serious heart condition at just 37, it was never possible for her to cultivate anything like a career in painting. The story of Grandma Moses must have made m...

 Readers rarely come to know about one person who devotes the most obsessive care and attention to the book they are reading: the typesetter. Michael Mitchell, the enormously gifted, sharp-tongued, impish, chain-smoking man who typeset all my books, ran the Libanus Press with one partner, Susan Wightman, and together they turned out book after elegant book. His views on type were strong. Once, asked to identify a typeface, he wrote back: "Awful font. We think all except capital I are Futura Extra bold – the slab seriffed cap I is probably drawn. Slabbed cap I's are a serious abomination." His 'studio' for that is what it ought to be called, was in a beautiful house in Marlborough, Wiltshire. It had lovely huge rooms had an exquisitely groomed garden at the back, as perfect as a well-set page. The times I visited him, there was always lunch and wine and smoke and talk as well as work and always a book at the end as a gift. He died in November, aged ...