Eleanor Catton, one of the very first speakers, is the youngest ever author to have won the Man Booker Prize. She shot to literary fame for her mammoth second novel, The Luminaries. Set in her native New Zealand during the 1860s gold rush, it is an adventure mystery written in an experimental form anchored in the movements of the sun, the moon, and the twelve signs of the zodiac. Its chapter lengths lessen in accordance with the lunar cycle.
Nayantara Sahgal, veteran political columnist and author, will appear on a panel with her biographer, the feminist publisher Ritu Menon. During her decades-long career, she has chronicled the extraordinary breadth of Indian history she has witnessed and participated in, from Independence and the dark days of the Emergency under her cousin Indira Gandhi to today's cocktail of nationalism and liberalisation. She has been as commended for her relentless outspokenness against fascism as for her fiction, which has won her numerous prestigious awards.
Jonathan Gil Harris, professor of English at Ashoka University, and prolific academic, will present an illustrated talk on The First Firangis – some of the earliest European migrants to India who came not with an intention to trade or conquer, but to escape hardships at home. Contrary to popular belief, many of these firangis served Indian masters. This constellation of myth-busting and colourful stories will be a peek into his new book on the same subject.
Jung Chang's Wild Swans smashed best-selling records, but her work is banned in China. The Britain-based author relates 100 years of Chinese history through the experiences of three generations of women in her own family – her grandmother, her mother, and herself. She has written two other acclaimed books – one on Mao Zedong (co-written with her historian husband), and another on the misrepresented Chinese Empress Cixi.
Janice Pariat has written the award-winning Boats on Land, a collection of short stories anchored in Shillong, and spanning 150 years. Her second published book is a novel titled Seahorse, set in New Delhi and London, and retells the myth of Poseidon in a contemporary and queer context. Though best known for her prose, Pariat also writes poetry, and her upcoming collection is called The Memory of Place: Poems from Shillong and Elsewhere.
Irwin Allan Sealy is the author of a range of works that defy convention, including the novels The Trotter-Nama, The Everest Hotel and The Brainfever Bird, as well as a travelogue, From Yukon to Yucatan. Sealy is also apprenticed to a bricklayer, and his 2014 work, The Small Wild Goose Pagoda, is the story of how Sealy built a pagoda next to his own house in Dehradun.
Damon Galgut is a renowned South African novelist and playwright who published his first novel when he was 17, will participate in a panel with Sealy on the truth-telling powers of fiction. His novel The Good Doctor was nominated for the Man Booker. He has fictionalised a decade of E.M. Forster's life in his work Arctic Summer, in which he delves into Forster's pivotal experiences of India.
P Sainath is a much-acclaimed veteran journalist on rural affairs, whose latest work, The People's Archive of Rural India, is, in his own words, “a living archive of the world's most diverse and complex countryside”. Recognising the decline of libraries and museums due to the Internet, this new online resource aims to be an encyclopaedia containing video, still images, text, and audio on the lives of people from rural India. Sainath's Everybody Loves a Good Drought, on poverty in rural India, is taught in over a hundred universities all over the world.
Ahdaf Soueif is the founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature, which has featured literary giants such as Harold Pinter, John Berger, Seamus Heaney, and Philip Pullman. The Egyptian novelist and political commentator has written Booker Prize nominated-fiction, as well as accounts of the revolution in Cairo, and her experiences of Palestine. Her writing and activism have earned her the reputation of being one of the most important political voices from Egypt today.
K Satchitanandan writes in Malayalam and English. As a poet, he has been extensively translated, with 23 collections appearing in 19 languages. As a prose writer, he has written in a wide variety of genres, including criticism, travel writing, and plays. He is a literary and academic giant, as one of the founders of Malayalam's “after-modernist poetry” movement, the translator of world poetry into Malayalam, and as a spokesperson for the rights of minorities. He has won 35 awards for his life's work, including four Kerala Sahitya Akademi awards.
Nayantara Sahgal, veteran political columnist and author, will appear on a panel with her biographer, the feminist publisher Ritu Menon. During her decades-long career, she has chronicled the extraordinary breadth of Indian history she has witnessed and participated in, from Independence and the dark days of the Emergency under her cousin Indira Gandhi to today's cocktail of nationalism and liberalisation. She has been as commended for her relentless outspokenness against fascism as for her fiction, which has won her numerous prestigious awards.
Jonathan Gil Harris, professor of English at Ashoka University, and prolific academic, will present an illustrated talk on The First Firangis – some of the earliest European migrants to India who came not with an intention to trade or conquer, but to escape hardships at home. Contrary to popular belief, many of these firangis served Indian masters. This constellation of myth-busting and colourful stories will be a peek into his new book on the same subject.
Jung Chang's Wild Swans smashed best-selling records, but her work is banned in China. The Britain-based author relates 100 years of Chinese history through the experiences of three generations of women in her own family – her grandmother, her mother, and herself. She has written two other acclaimed books – one on Mao Zedong (co-written with her historian husband), and another on the misrepresented Chinese Empress Cixi.
Janice Pariat has written the award-winning Boats on Land, a collection of short stories anchored in Shillong, and spanning 150 years. Her second published book is a novel titled Seahorse, set in New Delhi and London, and retells the myth of Poseidon in a contemporary and queer context. Though best known for her prose, Pariat also writes poetry, and her upcoming collection is called The Memory of Place: Poems from Shillong and Elsewhere.
Irwin Allan Sealy is the author of a range of works that defy convention, including the novels The Trotter-Nama, The Everest Hotel and The Brainfever Bird, as well as a travelogue, From Yukon to Yucatan. Sealy is also apprenticed to a bricklayer, and his 2014 work, The Small Wild Goose Pagoda, is the story of how Sealy built a pagoda next to his own house in Dehradun.
Damon Galgut is a renowned South African novelist and playwright who published his first novel when he was 17, will participate in a panel with Sealy on the truth-telling powers of fiction. His novel The Good Doctor was nominated for the Man Booker. He has fictionalised a decade of E.M. Forster's life in his work Arctic Summer, in which he delves into Forster's pivotal experiences of India.
P Sainath is a much-acclaimed veteran journalist on rural affairs, whose latest work, The People's Archive of Rural India, is, in his own words, “a living archive of the world's most diverse and complex countryside”. Recognising the decline of libraries and museums due to the Internet, this new online resource aims to be an encyclopaedia containing video, still images, text, and audio on the lives of people from rural India. Sainath's Everybody Loves a Good Drought, on poverty in rural India, is taught in over a hundred universities all over the world.
Ahdaf Soueif is the founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature, which has featured literary giants such as Harold Pinter, John Berger, Seamus Heaney, and Philip Pullman. The Egyptian novelist and political commentator has written Booker Prize nominated-fiction, as well as accounts of the revolution in Cairo, and her experiences of Palestine. Her writing and activism have earned her the reputation of being one of the most important political voices from Egypt today.
K Satchitanandan writes in Malayalam and English. As a poet, he has been extensively translated, with 23 collections appearing in 19 languages. As a prose writer, he has written in a wide variety of genres, including criticism, travel writing, and plays. He is a literary and academic giant, as one of the founders of Malayalam's “after-modernist poetry” movement, the translator of world poetry into Malayalam, and as a spokesperson for the rights of minorities. He has won 35 awards for his life's work, including four Kerala Sahitya Akademi awards.
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