Wednesday, June 27, 2012

An Immigrant's Quest For The Experiernce

Indian writers had been dominating the long list of authors competing for Asia's top English-language literary prize - the Man Booker. One such writer whose name has featured many a times on the Booker long list is Amitava Ghosh.But unfortunately, the prize eluded him every time. 


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Ghosh, one of India’s best-known writers is best known for The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances, The Hungry Tide. His most recent novel, Sea of Poppies, is the first volume of the Ibis Trilogy.

Ghosh originally from Calcutta, the quintessential East Indian city that has produced so many writers of repute in the past, has been to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College, City University of New York, as Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature and since then had been living in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker, author of the Laura Riding biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993) and works as a senior editor at Little, Brown and Company.

He has also been a visiting professor to the English department of Harvard University since 2005. Nonetheless, Ghosh's subject is India and he had been writing mostly on Indian immigrants. His books have a keen Indian sensibility as well. In Ibis Trilogy, of which two volumes have been published to date, Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke- are based on immigrant experiences of Indians at a time when the idea of India had not been formed.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Neustadt International Prize for Rohington Mistry

Rohington Mistry wins this year's Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He is the second Indian since Raja Rao (who won it in 1988) to have got this prestigious award. Mistry had shot to fame with his collection of short stories called Tales from Firozsha Baag. It was later published in the United States as Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag.The book consists of 11 short stories, all set within one apartment complex in modern-day Mumbai.

Later Misrty wrote a mammoth piece of fiction  Such a Long Journey, which won many awards, but none in his home country India. In fact this had been the case always with this immensely talented writer. The Indian lierary world nowadays revolves around the Man Booker Prize and since Mistry never won one, perhaps the government too had ignored him.

But Mistry's books are all about India, set mostly among the Parsee communities scattered accross India and mostly in Mumbai. He writes with a rare empathy for the community and with mesmerizing skills which makes the reader too empathise with his characters. His stories often do not have any end-point and only thrives on narrative in the class of Marquez and Coetzee.  

The Neustadt International Prize for Literature was established as the Books Abroad International Prize for Literature in 1969 by Ivar Ivask, editor of Books Abroad. It was subsequently renamed the Books Abroad/Neustadt Prize, and the award assumed its present name in 1976. It is the first international literary award of this scope to originate in the United States and is one of the very few international prizes for which poets, novelists, and playwrights are equally eligible.