Penguin India bags rights for Kiran Desai’s new novel, Pamuk

Ravi Singh, editor-in-chief and publisher of Penguin India, said, "Being chosen to publish Orhan Pamuk is easily among the biggest moments in Penguin India’s history. Also it is a thrill and a privilege to publish a writer of Kiran’s astonishing skill..." Penguin India has acquired the subcontinent rights for two of the most eagerly sought after authors in the literary world — Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai’s new novel “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s next three works including his new novel “A Strangeness in My Mind“.

Desai became the youngest woman to win the Man Booker Prize when her second novel “The Inheritance of Loss” (Penguin India) won the coveted literary prize in 2006. “The Inheritance of Loss” went on to become an international bestseller, and has sold an astounding 190,000 copies in India alone.

“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” promises to be bigger and even more compelling. Bought on the basis of a brilliant four page synopsis, the rights to publish the novel have been hotly contested by all the leading publishers of the world. The novel will be published in 2012.

Full report here Hindu

Midnight’s other children

In the spring of 1997, the literary quarterly Granta published an issue devoted to India’s Golden Jubilee. The tone was cautious but celebratory: on the cover, the country’s name was printed in bright red letters, followed by an exclamation point. Fifty years after partition, an independent India was rapidly establishing itself as an international power. The issue, which consisted largely of contributions from native Indians writing in English, was a testament both to the country’s extraordinary intellectual and artistic richness, and to one of the few legacies of British colonialism that could be unequivocally celebrated by readers in South Asia and the West: a common language. Seventeen years after Salman Rushdie’s shot across the bow with Midnight’s Children, a new generation of Indian writers was, in Granta’s words, “matching India’s new vibrancy with their own.”

In the ensuing years, the American appetite for Indian culture has only grown. Many of the writers who arrived on the scene in the 1980s and ’90s — Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy (whose wildly successful novel The God of Small Things was first serialized in Granta), Amit Chaudhuri — continued to publish fiction and reportage, and a new wave of novelists, including Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga, went on to write prize-winning, best-selling books. Readers of Roy, Desai or Adiga — not to mention the viewers who flocked to “Slumdog Millionaire” — have not been spared portraits of Indian life’s miseries (caste-based discrimination, horrific poverty). But the folkloric and redemptive aspects of the stories, already familiar thanks to Rushdie’s magic realism and the more romantic understandings of Hinduism associated with the Kama Sutra, have merely solidified Westerners’ rosy vision of India. These books and films have also complemented the work of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, who was born in London and raised in Rhode Island and has written vividly about Indian-Americans. The Indian experience, however foreign, has become part of the American experience.

Full report here NYT

You are what you read: Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai surprised observers back in 2006 when she won the Man Booker Prize for her novel “The Inheritance of Loss,” becoming the youngest female writer to ever be seen as worthy of the award. The novel, a tale of migration, became available to Turkish bookworms last week under the title of “Kaybın Türküsü.” On account of the introduction of her work to the Turkish book market, we spoke with Desai about her adventures in writing.

Your novel opens with the Borges poem “Boast of Quietness.” Why did you select this poem as an epigraph?
This poem reflects the souls of the characters in the novel well. When you go to another country as a migrant, there are difficulties that you experience. The real important thing isn’t just your own story. There are many people’s stories like yours, and there are people who share the same fate, just as there are many books in a genre on library shelves. But you tell your own story. I selected this poem because it conveys similar feelings to readers. In the same way, when you look at the migration stories of Latin Americans and Mexicans, you can feel the parallels between all migrants’ stories. For this reason, Borges is a writer in whom I have a lot of trust in when it comes to conveying those feelings.

In “The Inheritance of Loss” you say that you tell your own story, your own “migrant experience.” How did migration and the feeling of “placelessness” and “nationlessness” affect your authorship? If you hadn’t ever migrated to the West when you left India at age 14, what kind of a life would you have had?
Being a migrant forces you to be creative because in one way or another you have a motivation, like to be successful. Your world and the environment you are in are changing, and this always makes you a more creative person. Staying in the country of your birth or living in another country … for example, it’s not just these two choices. Even if you live in the US, you may have even more different choices there. You can live like a hippie or be a very successful businesswoman. Choices are everywhere, no matter where you are. You choose your own life. For example in a family you can see that while one person chose to be a doctor, another wants to grow vegetables. These options are always in our own hands, they’re not bounded by the place we live in. But, of course, there is a light feeling of loss created by the migration feeling.

Full interview here Zaman

Hinduism and modernity

The contemporary Indian novel might be said to have two strains. The first is the Indian novel in English, and its best-known representatives are household names: Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra, Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga. The second is the Indian novel in languages other than English, and who the great names are in this space depends very much on the language and geographical location of the reader. The English-speaking reader, relying solely on translations and looking down again from a pan-Indian perspective, might say that currently these are the Bengali novelists Sankar and Mahasweta Devi, the Tamil writer Salma, the Hindi writer Alka Saraogi, the Oriya writer Chandrasekhar Rath, and the Rajasthani folklorist Vijay Dan Detha.

One remarkable aspect of the Indian novel is that both these strains trace their origins in the work of one man, Bankimchandra Chatterji (1838-1894). The first Indian to take a BA under the new English-medium educational system set up by the British, Chatterji thereby came under the influence of the novel, then a prose form unknown in India. Chatterji’s first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife (1865), written while he was a young deputy magistrate in the newly established Indian civil service, was composed in English.

Full report here Mint

Desai captures audience with cross-cultural tale

Indian author Kiran Desai walked on stage Wednesday night with a book in her hand and a wealth of experience and knowledge to share.

Desai read an excerpt from her award-winning novel “The Inheritance of Loss” to a large crowd of more than 100 University students in the Multipurpose Room of the Rutgers Student Center on the College Avenue campus.

The book touches on some of her own experiences as an Indian immigrant, but mainly aims to explore the effects of globalization and assimilation on various cultures. As the youngest winner of the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award, Desai was a fitting choice to speak, said Carolyn Williams, director of the Writers at Rutgers Reading Series.

“I wanted to have an excellent author who could read about South Asian authors and themes,” said Williams, an English professor.

Full report here Daily Targum

Enroute to Goa

Orhan Pamuk has not been a frequent visitor to India. That however is likely to change as he heads for Goa with his new partner, Kiran Desai.

Even as his latest book, The Museum of Innocence is acclaimed throughout the world, the book acknowledges the role Desai played. And the two are headed to Goa to work on their respective books. His book however will be on Istanbul.

“I’m going to Goa with my girlfriend Kiran," he said. "She is a beautiful and intelligent person. India should be proud of her.”

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