Crossword awards announced

The Vodafone Crossword Book Awards 2010, the Crossword Book Award in the Indian Fiction category was jointly won by Omair Ahmed for Jimmy, The Terrorist and Anjali Joseph for Saraswati Park.

The award for Indian Non-Fiction went to VS Ramachandran for The Tell Tale Brain while Ranjit Lal won the award for Children's Writing for Faces in the Water.

The Vodafone Crossword Popular Book Award, which offers readers the opportunity to vote (online) for their favourite book from the list of the shortlisted books across the Indian Fiction and Indian Non-Fiction categories, was won by author Ashwin Sanghi for Chanakya's Chant.

The rest of the winners were selected by a panel of judges comprising well-known academics, critics and writers such as Geeta Doctor, Githa Hariharan, CS Lakshmi, Harsh Sethi, Sampurna Chattarji and Anshumani Ruddhra.

Full report here DNA

Related news: 
Literature award for Omair Ahmed and Anjali Joseph Hindustan Times
Awards for excellence in Indian writing Times of India

Saraswati Park is worth a brief visit

The Good: An eloquently told story that submerges you into the miniscule world of the Mumbai suburbia and its lower middle class tenants without unnecessary drama or a false sense of utopia. The book is certainly worth reading once.

The Bad: It has a weak and unresolved ending that leaves you with a feeling that there was a lot more that needed to be said. The book has a brilliant opening chapter but mostly goes downhill from there.

Saraswati Park is Anjali Joseph's debut novel and she does impress for a first-timer. There is not much in terms of plot; rather the book is an attempt to delve into human emotions.

The characters: We follow the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Karekar and their nephew Ashish, all whom stay in flat in Saraswati Park - a quiet suburb of Mumbai.

The frustrations and dreams of the would-be author Mohan Karekar, the disappointments and hopes of his wife Lakshmi and the confused and wildly emotional roller coaster that is the life of the their gay nephew Ashish are all very well described. The words flow smoothly and often leave you smiling at the small joys and victories that you yourself have no doubt experienced in your live.

Full review here Sify

'I found the novel as I wrote it'

Anjali Joseph, who lives in the UK but has spent much of her life in Mumbai, was recently chosen as one of the Telegraph’s Top 20 novelists in the UK under 40, a great accolade for a first-time novelist. IBNLive caught up with Anjali Joseph, the author of Saraswati Park

IBNLive: How long was ‘Saraswati Park’ in the making?
Anjali Joseph: Eighteen months. The ideation and the writing pretty much happened at the same time. I didn't start out with the entire thing in my head, I found it as I wrote.

IBNLive:: What DID you start with?
Anjali Joseph: A short story about Mohan (one of the three central characters) and the day that he found the booksellers were being evicted. So basically what became the first chapter of the novel.

IBNLive:: What made you decide to amplify it?
Anjali Joseph: I'd been writing short stories and with most of them there was no real sense in my head of 'What happens next?' But with this one I felt it was only a start. And a friend who read it asked me if it was the start of a novel. I said 'no no no' but thought 'maybe'... And then I just wrote a bit every day for the next six months or so till I had a draft.

IBNLive:: Six months is brilliant for a novel of what... 75,000 words?
Anjali Joseph: It's just under 70,000 words, but six months was for a raw first draft and then there were several more drafts.

Full interview here IBNLive

A city’s consciousness

Sharply etched portraits of Mumbai and its people trapped in a plot of contrived ends

On almost every page of Saraswati Park, Anjali Joseph’s debut novel, named for the block of flats in which the three central characters live, the calmness of the narrative appears to be a build-up to an explosive finale. Detailing with meticulous attention what each of the three does as they go about their daily lives, the storyline is so front-loaded with possibilities that a crisis, even a catastrophe, seems inevitable.

This is reinforced all the more by the choice of Mumbai as a setting. The placid prose—not as ultra slo-mo or as up close to the subject as Amit Chaudhuri’s, but definitely a reminder—is almost a set-up for the seemingly mundane lives of Mohan, his wife Lakshmi and his nephew Ashish to intersect with one of the many violent events to have befallen the city. So it is both a relief and a disappointment that nothing of the sort happens—despite the (unintentional?) red herrings in the form of Ashish wandering past Leopold Café and the Gateway of India late one evening.

Full report here Mint

In familiar territory

Anjali Joseph, whose book Saraswati Park was released recently holds forth on growing up in the U.K., her links with India and the different ‘Bombay' that she writes about. It is the story of a letter writer who sits outside the General Post Office in Mumbai (or ‘Bombay', as she calls it) and dreams of a life he believes cannot be his.

She sits across the table at the Press Club in Mumbai, in an obviously familiar environment, eyes sparkling, her being concentrated into the surprisingly small space she occupies; she has a big voice, big eyes, big presence but is a tiny woman. Anjali Joseph had a busy trip in Mumbai, her time filled with interviews, a launch, a reading and those eternal questions, answered over and over again and quoted verbatim in endless write-ups. She commutes between London where she lives, studies for a Ph.D. and writes and Pune, where her parents are based, wondering whether the ratio of time she spends in each country should not be skewed somewhat differently.

Flurry of attention
The recent flurry of attention comes from her first novel, Saraswati Park, the story of a letter writer who sits outside the General Post Office in Mumbai (or ‘Bombay', as she calls it) and dreams of a life he believes cannot be his. And what is her life all about? Who is Anjali Joseph? “God, this is like my crisis every morning before the second cup of coffee!” she laughs.

Full report here Hindu

I’m a nostalgic person: Anjali Joseph

Anjali Joseph’s Saraswati Park has been described by author Amit Chaudhuri as “the best debut novel I have read in a long time”, it has been selected as one of four  short listed titles for the third round of Rising Stars promotion for 2010 and it also landed the young author on Telegraph’s list of Britain’s top 20 authors under 40. In her debut novel, Joseph offers the reader with a piece of Mumbai that has slowly trickled away to oblivion.

She says that Saraswati Park was written in a flurry of homesickness, “I’m a nostalgic person. The house in the novel resembles my grandparents’ house in Mumbai, where I spent most of my childhood.” She recounts fondly, “We weren’t a very athletic family. Everybody read a lot. I was fascinated by this when I was four and couldn’t wait to start reading. Every time books diverted their attention away from me, I thought to myself, “even I want to do that!”

Anjali believes that her book portrays Mumbai as it really is, without the gloss, “For the average Mumbai-kar, his daily life takes precedence over shopping arcades. His life revolves around his early morning train ride to work and back. It is as simple as that.”

Full report here DNA

A new era of Indian writing in English has arrived!

 Most reviewers across the world have given a thumbs up to Anjali Josephs "Saraswati Park." As famed author Siddharth dhanvant Sanghavi spoke of this book " as not necessarily about the grand india of rajas and maharajas, but a more real, humble book about the daily lives and emotions of India" Anjali soaked in all the good wishes. She read excerpts sincerely from the book; and acknowledged that her book was not about any big idea...it was just a mirror of daily life.

Parallels were drawn to many authors who just reflected what they saw around them beautifully through their writing, such as a Jane Austen or even a Somerset Maugham. Sanghavi also said that the simple brilliance of the writing could be compared to an RK Narayan.

All in all, a very intellectual evening attended by senior members of Indian media and also by cheerful couple Pravina and Jamal Mecklai.

Minimum city

The week that passed has been unpleasant for the novel. Two of its most feted practitioners — Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan— received an unkind cut, being omitted from the year’s Man Booker longlist; in another outburst, a former Oxford professor condemned the duo’s work as well-crafted but hollow, denouncing the contemporary English novel as passing through a “fallow period”.

A final word on what makes for literary excellence is neither possible nor desirable; a dialogue, on the other hand, on the state of the present-day novel is welcome, especially if you have just finished reading Saraswati Park, a debut novel by Anjali Joseph, a former commissioning editor for Elle. Joseph, incidentally, was listed by The Daily Telegraph as one of 20 writers under 40 to watch out for.

Saraswati Park (named after the suburban Mumbai residential enclave where the main characters stay) is a book about “love and loss and the noise in our heads”, the blurb on the book jacket says; it is supposed to depict “how, in spite of everything, life… continues”. Capturing the continuum that is life in 250-odd pages is a tall order for any creative artist, to say the least, and Joseph sets to accomplish the task by letting us peer into the life of Mohan Karekar, a letter writer who plies his trade near the Mumbai GPO and dreams of writing short stories, his wife Lakshmi and Ashish, a 19-year-old nephew who comes to live with them.

Full report here Indian Express