Damning the oriental scene

Reading literature and having a damn good time had become quietly but decidedly uncoupled,” writes Lev Grossman in an essay on the rise of the trashy hybrid novel. He could have been writing about India, where the rise of imitation pulp fiction — the Third World version of Eric Segal, not even the Third World version of Stephen King — and the growth of worshippers at the broad church of illiterature is an alarming but persistent trend. These are four things I’d love to see changing about the Indian literary scene in the next decade.

The Booker: It’s so tempting to pin the Indian obsession with the Booker on Arundhati Roy, whose win in 1997 for God of Small Things sparked off the great Indian Booker gold rush. (Blaming Arundhati is now a small cottage industry in its own right, so she may as well take the rap for the Booker. It’s a more interesting crime than hating the US, sympathising with the Maoists and never writing a sentence if she can get away with a paragraph.)


But the truth is, it’s our fault. If we’re losing interest in the Booker this year because Rushdie didn’t make it to the longlist and there isn’t another Indian/Asian contender, perhaps we need to ask when we became such insular readers. A century ago, the first Indian writers to claim English as one of their own languages read broadly; their imaginations were fired by their counterparts in Russia, Europe and America. A generation ago, Amitav Ghosh chronicled the practice of using the list of Nobel literature laureates as a kind of reader’s guide — a dreary but worthy way of inviting the world onto one’s bookshelves. What we’re seeing today isn’t just a preoccupation with literary success; it’s an unhealthy self-obsession.


Full report here Business Standard

Literature key to Dublin's economic renewal - Mayor

THE IMPORTANCE of Dublin’s literary activity to its economic renewal was highlighted at the launch of the Dublin Book Festival last night.

Over 100 Irish authors, poets and journalists will feature in the festival, which runs from March 6th to 8th. Speaking at the launch, Lord Mayor of Dublin Emer Costello said that promoting Dublin as a creative and cultural city was important to economic renewal.
Festival artistic director Alan Hayes said he was hopeful that Dublin would be designated a Unesco International City of Literature in the next few months.
This “huge opportunity” would open the city to an international audience and bring in cultural tourists, who spend more money and stay longer, he said.
Surviving redundancy and Ireland’s rebel history are among the issues being debated in a series of public discussions which are taking place throughout the festival. Irish Times literary editor Caroline Walsh will join a discussion on the art of literary criticism, while Irish Times journalists Gerry Thornley and Gavin Cummiskey will explore sports writing in Ireland.

Full report here Irish Times