anuradha roy

Almost each time I am travelling to a country I've never been to, Christopher Maclehose, my publisher, sends me a book for the journey. On my first trip to Bali, he had sent Christina Jordis's Bali, Java, in My Dreams -- which introduced me to Walter Spies and started off my new book. When I was going to Iceland earlier this year for the Reykjavik Literature Festival, he gave me Independent People , by Halldor Laxness. This magnificent, engimatic tragedy is not to everyone's taste. When it was published in the US, Kirkus Reviews called it "A bleak and bitter book, with little to interest or attract the American reader". But I am not American, and although it mystified me at times and its main character Bjartur often made me very angry, this is one of the most brilliant books I've ever come across. It haunts me still, weeks later, and despite its length I know I'm going to go back to it. I don't know how it read in Icelandic, but in English tr...

I am going to miss the new show at Lockbridge Pottery on 23rd and 24th August, but cannot believe how lucky I am to be going there the week after because of a hugely generous invitation from potters Jeff Diehl and Donna Diehl. Jeff Diehl’s work has appeared in many prestigious collections worldwide, including the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Korean Craft Museum. He has been making pots for over forty years. They live and work in a converted schoolhouse, which they renovated and then built kilns around to fire their ceramics.  Of the pottery, an article by Lucia K. Hyde says:  Lockbridge Road in Summers County winds for several miles through rolling farmland, past houses and grassy meadows, before arriving at an old, two-room schoolhouse. The school sits well back from the road on tidy grounds. Clusters of flowers bloom around the broad front porch, and the school's canine mascot naps on the stone walkway. In the large fi...

Out now in Indian Quarterly Read the complete essay here The wind’s direction has been changing from south-west to north-north-east on my phone’s weather app as irregularly as a breeze throws around leaves. The sky clouds over, rain follows, icy with hail sometimes. The cold’s teeth sharpen. Snow is possible again and, although we know the mess afterwards, we want to be suspended in the dreamy silence it brings. This year though, there has been mostly sleet and ground frost that melted into muck, only once or twice the enchantments of a snowfall. This doesn’t feel like the start of warmth, but the earth knows more than humans do. Just a few days into February, in our part of the Himalaya, the soil changed. Overnight it had become loamier, more friable. The ice-hard, cold-dead ground was coming back to life. Worms slid through the clods when I forked the earth. Beads of green dotted the bare brown, multiplying every new morning into grass and weeds. In another week, below t...

Wonderful to know that All the Lives We Never Lived   is in this amazing list of books  nominated for the 2019 Walter Scott Prize.

This is a Guest Post by Madhumita Mazumdar, who discovered an intriguing story behind the flowers and foliage planned for the city she lives in, Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Photograph by Partha Chowdhury shows an avenue of Amaltas ( Cassia Fistula ) in Dwarka, Delhi One of the many things I loved about Myshkin Chand Rozario, one of the enigmatic protagonists of Anuradha Roy’s novel All the Lives We Never Lived , was his job as Horticultural Superintendent in the small town of Muntazir in the foothills of the Himalayas. Though often derided as “glorified gardner” Myshkin took immense pride in what he believed was his precious bequest to the little town -- its rows of carefully planted sheltering and flowering trees along major roads and pathways. He knew well he where he had to plant the white and purple orchids, the flaming red Gulmohurs, the Amaltases, the brilliantly hued kachnars, the softer pastels of the resham ruis. The streets were colour coded around the images their n...

The Rosalind Wilson Memorial Lecture has been a fixture on the Delhi school calendar for more than twenty years, and has featured writers such as Vikram Seth and William Dalrymple.  This year, the book being discussed was All the Lives We Never Lived . Springdales School organizes the discussion to honour the memory of Rosalind Wilson, who taught there. She was an English teacher at the school and also served as the head of the English department. She later founded and edited the popular children magazine Target . She died at the age of 49 in 1992. The Principal of the school, Mrs Ameeta Mulla Wattal, wrote in with this report of the discussion, which took place on 14th December 2018.    "The book discussion was riveting. Over 150 students across schools in the National Capital Region participated. All students had not only read the book but were very perceptive in giving their views on the issues in the novel. Gender justice, the politics of colonialists, qu...