ANJALI BANERJEE

Anjali Banerjee was born in India, raised in Canada and California. She has written five novels for youngsters and four novels for adults. Her novels for young adults, Maya Running and Looking for Bapu has received much critical acclaim. In this interview, she tells us about her writer superstitions, writing as an Indian not living in India and much more.
She is the author of four novels, Memories of Rain (1992), originally inspired by Brendan Kenelly's adaptation of Medea; The Glassblower's Breath (1993), about a single day in the lives of a butcher, a baker and a candle maker and the women they all love, set in Calcutta, New York and London; Moonlight into Marzipan (1995), the story of a remarkable discovery made in a crumbling garage laboratory in Calcutta; and A Sin of Colour (1999), which narrates the history of three generations of a wealthy Indian family from Calcutta. A Sin of Colour won the Southern Arts Literature Prize.
Anjali Banerjee lives in Oxford with her husband and two daughters.

Anita Rau Badami

Anita Rau Badami was born in 1961, in the town of Rourkela in ,Orissa, India. Her father, a mechanical engineer who designed trains, was transferred every two or three years, so that she had a mobile childhood. She grew up in a household where English was the primary language spoken and attended Catholic schools in India, because, as she explains, until around twenty years ago, these were the good schools in India .
At age 18, Anita Rau Badami borrowed money from her father to buy novels at a book fair in Chennai, India. To pay him back she took her first writing assignment, an article in a local newspaper, and earned 75 rupees. She holds degrees in Communication Media, English Literature, and Journalism from universities in Bombay and Madras. Badami began her career as a freelance writer in India with regular features in The Hindu, The Deccan Herald, and Indian Express.
She worked as a copywriter for advertising agencies in Bombay, Bangalore and Madras, and wrote stories for children's magazines. She married in 1984, had a son in 1987, and moved to Calgary in 1991. In 1995, she graduated from the University of Calgary where she received an M.A. degree in English. She submitted her first work to Penguin Books. Penguin published her work, and soon Badami was touring North America, reading from her best-selling debut novel Tamarind Mem.
Several of her short stories appeared in Canadian literary journals such as The Malahat Review, Event, Toronto Review of Contemporary Fiction among others. The Hero’s Walk was the winner of the Marian Engel Award for excellence in fiction for a body of work; a Finalist in the 2000 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize for fiction; and on the longlist for the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction.
The Hero's Walk was nominated for the 2002 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Hero's Walk also won the Commonwealth Best Book Prize in the Canada/ Caribbean region, as well as the Washington Post Best Book of 2001. Ms. Badami has taught writing at University of British Columbia.
Since moving to Montreal two years ago when her husband, Madhav, got a job teaching at McGill University, she has been working quietly on her third novel. A year ago, she received a call from Concordia offering her the position.
It was in Vancouver that she began working on her third novel, Can You Hear the Night Bird Sing, to be published next fall. She has been contacted by her publishers in India and England to republish her children’s stories, and she has had an idea for book number four. The working title is The Guest.

Anita Nair

Anita Nair was born on 26 January 1966, in Kerala, India. A bestselling author of fiction and poetry, her novels The Better Man and Ladies Coupe have been translated in to 21 languages. She was educated in Chennai (Madras) before returning to Kerala, where she gained a BA in English Language and Literature. She lives with her husband and son in Bangalore. Her latest novel Mistress is published by Black Amber, £11.99.

Anita Desai

Anita Desai was born in Mussoorie, a hill station north of Delhi, as the daughter of a D.N. Mazumdar, a Bengali businessman, and the former Toni Nime, of German origin. She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English at school and in the city streets. She has said that she grew up surrounded by Western literature and music, not realizing until she was older that this was an anomaly in her world where she also learned the Eastern culture and customs. She married a businessman at twenty-one and raised several children before becoming known for her writing. Her first book, Cry,the Peacock was published in England in 1963, and her better known novels include In Custody (1984) and Baumgartner's Bombay (1988). She once wrote: "I see India through my mother's eyes, as an outsider, but my feelings for India are my father's, of someone born here" (Griffiths).
She never considered trying to first publish in India because there was no publisher in India who would be interested in fiction by an Indian writer (Jussawalla) and it was first in England that her work became noticed. U.S. readers were slower to discover her, due, she believes to England's natural interest in India and the U.S.'s lack of comprehension regarding the foreignness of her subject.
But Desai only writes in English. This, she has repeatedly said,was a natural and unconscious choice for her: "I can state definitely that I did not choose English in a deliberate and conscious act and I'd say perhaps it was the language that chose me and I started writing stories in English at the age of seven, and have been doing so for thirty years now without stopping to think why "(Desai).
She is considered the writer who introduced the psychological novel in the tradition of Virginia Woolf to India. Included in this, is her pioneer status of writing of feminist issues. While many people today would not classify her work as feminist, she believes this is due to changing times: "The feminist movement in India is very new and a younger generation of readers in India tends to be rather impatient of my books and to think of them as books about completely helpless women, hopeless women. They find it somewhat unreal that the women don't fight back, but they don't seem to realize how very new this movement is" (Jussawalla).
Also, she says, her writing is realistic: "Women think I am doing a disservice to the feminist movement by writing about women who have no control over their lives. But I was trying, as every writer tries to do, even in fiction, to get at the truth, write the truth. It would have been really fanciful if I had made [for example, in Clear Light of Day] Bim and Tara modern-day feminists "(in Griffiths).
Desai considers Clear Light of Day, her most autobiographical book, because she was writing about her neighborhood in Delhi, although the characters are not based on her brothers and sisters. What she was exploring in this novel, she has said, was the importance of childhood and memories as the source of a life. She had wanted to start the book at the end and move backwards, into the characters' childhood and further, into the childhood of their parents etc., but in the end: "When I had gone as far back as their infancy the book just ground to a halt; it lost its momentum. It told me that this was done, that I couldn't carry it further. But I still have a sense of disappointment about that book, because the intention had been different" (Jussawalla). The character of Raja is identified with her in the sense that he is so immersed in all different types of literature and culture, and is so concerned with protecting the multicultural heritage of India. His worries about the Muslim neighbor family is not just about them particularly, but rather worry about the loss of all that the Muslim culture and literature contributes to India.
While Desai has taught for years at Mount Holyoke and MIT, and spends most of the year outside of India, she does not consider herself part of the Indian Diaspora. Although she does not fit in the Indian box anymore (Griffiths) as she said, she considers herself lucky for having not left India until late in her life, because she feels that she has been drifting away from it ever since: "I can't really write of it with the same intensity and familiarity that I once had." Yet she cannot feel at home in any other place or society (Griffiths).

Amulya Malladi

Amulya Malladi was born and raised in India. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in engineering from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India and received a master's degree in journalism from The University of Memphis, Tennessee, USA.
After living in the United States for several years, Amulya now lives in Copenhagen, Denmark with her husband and two sons.
Amulya's fourth novel, Song of the Cuckoo Bird was released by Ballantine Books on December 27, 2005. She is currently working on her fifth novel, tentatively titled, The Sound of Language, which is set in Denmark.
You can contact Amulya by email at author@amulyamalladi.com

AKHIL SHARMA

AKHIL SHARMA was born in Delhi, India, in 1971. He grew up in Edison, New Jersey.
His stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories anthology, the O. Henry Award Winners anthology, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. He is a winner of The Voice Literary Supplement’s Year 2000 "Writers on the Verge" Award. A portion of An Obedient Father was excerpted in the debut fiction issue of The New Yorker in June 2000.
Sharma lives in New York City, where he is an investment banker at a major Wall Street firm.

Recent reviews...
"Sharma’s sharply realistic fiction effortlessly interweaves one man’s life, one family’s history, and one country’s fate into a compelling debut novel … Sharma allows his fiction to unfold through wonderfully rich details. From Karan’s cajoling of bribes from a school principal to his memories of his childhood in Beri to the minutiae of his sad domestic life with his daughter, the facts of this novel fascinate the reader. Combine this with Karan’s greedy, comic, petty, and ultimately horrifying voice, and the result is a tale that haunts us long after we’ve finished it. A remarkable first novel."
—Booklist, starred review
"A supernova in the galaxy of young, talented Indian writers, Sharma debuts with a bold and shocking novel that casts a mesmerizing spell. Ram Karan is a widower whose widowed daughter, Anita, and eight-year-old granddaughter, Asha, live with him in a tiny apartment in one of Delhi’s poorer sections. Nominally a functionary in the physical education department of the city’s schools, Ram is in fact ‘Mr. Gupta’s moneyman’; that is, he coerces bribes for his boss, who funnels the money to the Congress Party.
At first, Ram’s candid admissions of ‘general incompetence and laziness’ are perversely endearing, but when the real cause of his self-hatred comes to light, the reader’s perceptions begin to change. In a moment of temptation, Ram commits a furtive sexual act with his unwitting granddaughter – and his downfall begins. Twenty years ago, he had repeatedly raped Anita, who now becomes unhinged at the thought that her daughter may be in peril. Anita’s bizarre revenge will result in Ram’s complete degradation; ironically, the repercussions of her obsessive need for disclosure cause even more emotional damage to everyone involved. Concurrent with these personal tragedies and the breakdown of one family, Sharma draws an acid-etched picture of modern Indian society, in which the corrupt political system victimizes all citizens … Sharma’s depiction of a society riddled with graft, violent religious prejudice, male chauvinism and bigoted cultural attitudes is a cautionary tale about what happens to the individual spirit when poverty, superstition, racial tension and general hopelessness are exacerbated by the absence of judicial morality. This caustic yet darkly comic story resonates powerfully, as the reader comes to sympathize with fallible human beings trapped in circumstances that corrupt the soul."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

AMITAVA KUMAR

AMITAVA KUMAR was born in Ara, Bihar, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes.

Kumar’s writings have appeared in The Nation, Harper's, New Statesman, Transition, American Prospect, Toronto Review, Colorlines, Biblio, Outlook, Frontline, India Today, The Hindu, Himal, Herald, The Friday Times, The Times of India, and other publications. He has also been a literary columnist at Tehelka.com.
Kumar is the author of Passport Photos (University of California Press and Penguin-India, 2000) and Bombay-London-New York (Routledge and Penguin-India, forthcoming in 2002). Passport Photos was the winner of an “Outstanding Book of the Year” Award from the Myers Program for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. Kumar is also the scriptwriter and narrator of the prize-winning documentary, Pure Chutney (1997).

He has been awarded a Barach Fellowship at the Wesleyan Writers Festival and a SAJA prize in 2001 for op-ed writing. He has won fellowships from the NEH, Yale University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Dartmouth College, and University of California-Riverside. Kumar is a professor in the English department at Penn State University. He and his wife live in State College, only a few blocks away from three equally bad Indian restaurants.