Author Kiran Desai In 2025 Booker Prize Longlist For Second Novel
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
a day ago
- Indian Express
Can an outsider tell the story of India? Revisiting the legacy of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
At a creative writing seminar, our class found itself grappling with the polarising question: who has the right to write about whom? Can a non-Indian writer authentically capture Indian experiences? The discussion, while lively, was inconclusive, as is often the case with questions of representation and narrative authority. No one left with a definitive answer, and perhaps that was the point. At the heart of the debate lies concerns about whether an outsider can truly understand places, people, and psyches that are not their own. And if they can, whether that understanding should be accepted as authentic? Few writers test the boundaries of that debate more than Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the German-born, British-raised, Indian-residing author and screenwriter. The only person ever to win both a Booker Prize (Heat and Dust, 1975) and an Academy Award (A Room with a View, 1986), Jhabvala is paradoxically revered in film circles, and overlooked in literary ones. She is rarely included in the Indian canon, despite living in Delhi for over two decades. Jhabvala herself, in a 1974 interview, dismissed the notion of being called an 'Indian writer,' aligning instead with the tradition of European authors who have written about India from the outside looking in. It was a statement which in theory, should have ended the debate. But it did not not because what Jhabvala produced, particularly in her fiction, was a literary cinema of Indian life that defies easy classification. Her short story collection Like Birds, Like Fishes reveals an author whose understanding of Indian domesticity did not come from cultural inheritance but from prolonged proximity and observation. Her prose, tinged with irony and vulnerability, often illuminates Indian masculinity in ways rarely explored. In The Interview, for instance, a male narrator wrestles with the power dynamics of the household: 'All the time I was eating, I could feel my sister-in-law looking at me and smiling. It made me uncomfortable… It was as if she were saying, 'You see, you will always have to be dependent on us.'' There is something delicate in how Jhabvala exposes the emotional dependencies of men, especially in our culture. Her work invites comparison with Anita Desai, another chronicler of interiority. However, Jhabvala's most telling counterpart may be found not in India but in Trinidad. VS Naipaul in his seminal novel A House for Mr Biswas charts the existential unease of a man who, though ethnically Indian, is geographically and spiritually unmoored. Like Jhabvala, Naipaul approaches Indian-ness not as a given, but as a question. In one early passage, Naipaul sums up Mr Biswas's insecurities: 'It gave Mr. Biswas some satisfaction that, in the circumstances, Shama did not run straight off to her mother to beg for help… Now she tried to comfort Mr Biswas, and devised plans on her own.' Both authors, though writing from different vantage points, share a preoccupation with the vulnerability of Indian men. In Jhabvala, that vulnerability is social and often domestic. In Naipaul, it is existential, rooted in dislocations of post-colonial identity. But in both, it is rendered with unusual empathy and complexity. So, who gets to tell these stories? The question, while important, may be less useful than we think. Rather than gatekeeping perspective, perhaps the more pressing task is to interrogate what is done with it. How deeply it looks, how honestly it listens, and how thoughtfully it depicts the world it seeks to portray. Jhabvala, like Naipaul, may not 'belong' to the tradition she depicts. But she lived in its shadows and side streets long enough to sketch them with care. Her work may never satisfy those in search of cultural purity or representational precision. But it endures because it does what good literature must: it sees. (As I See It is a space for bookish reflection, part personal essay and part love letter to the written word.)
The Hindu
2 days ago
- The Hindu
The Hindu On Books newsletter: Kiran Desai on Booker longlist, Kuvempu in English, ‘The Lion of Naushera' and more
Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The Booker Prize longlist for 2025 is out and past winner Kiran Desai is back on it 19 years later for her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Penguin). The judges, led by Roddy Doyle, called the novel about a pair of young Indians in America 'vast and immersive', which enfolds a 'magical realist fable within a social novel within a love story.' Booker's dozen The Booker's dozen or 13 longlisted novels, include two debutants, Albanian-American writer and playwright Ledia Xhoga (Misinterpretation/Daunt Books) and Ukrainian-Canadian writer Maria Reva (Endling/Virago), and five British authors. Other writers on the longlist are Katie Kitamura for Audition (Fern Press), Tash Aw for The South (4th Estate), Natasha Brown for Universality (Faber), Claire Adam for Love Forms (Faber), Jonathan Buckley for One Boat (Fitzcarraldo Editions), Susan Choi for Flashlight (Jonathan Cape), Ben Markovits for The Rest of Our Lives (Faber), Andrew Miller for The Land in Winter (Sceptre), David Szalay for Flesh (Jonathan Cape) and Benjamin Wood for Seascraper (Viking). The shortlist will be announced on September 23, and the winner on November 10. In reviews, we read an excerpt from The Lion of Naushera, Kuvempu's magnum opus in English, Joan Didion's posthumous book and more. Books of the week Legendary Kannada writer Kuvempu's 1967 novel, Malegalalli Madumagalu, an exemplary work of social realism, has been recently translated into English (Bride in the Hills/Penguin Modern Classics) by Vanamala Viswanatha. In 2020, K.M. Srinivasa Gowda and G.K. Srikanta Murthy also translated it into English (Bride in the Rainy Mountains). Set in the late 19th-century Western Ghats, a region of dense forests teeming with animals, birds, and diverse communities, Bride in the Hills, writes N.S. Gundur in his review, explores the lives of ordinary folks 'far away from the grand mainstream of the historical flow of civilisation'. However, colonial modernity later enters this lifeworld with a bicycle, Christian missionaries and schools. 'Of all the portraits in the novel, it is the subaltern characters — Gutthi, Aita, Pinchalu, Akkani and Pijina — who win our hearts in tune with the novel's epigraph: 'No one is unimportant/Nothing is insignificant',' says Gundur. Brigadier Mohammed Usman was touching 36 when he led a contingent to wrest two strategic locations in Jammu and Kashmir from Pakistan in 1948. Given a choice to move to Pakistan after Partition, he chose India. Brigadier Usman died in combat, and was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra posthumously for his valour. Read an extract from a new book, The Lion of Naushera (Bloomsbury) by Ziya Us Salam and Anand Mishra. After Joan Didion passed away in 2021, summaries of sessions with a psychiatrist were found in her desk addressed to her husband John Gregory Dunne. Didion's Notes to John (HarperCollins), published posthumously, raises several questions, not least should such notes have been published? and b) what is the quality of the book itself? In a piece, Suresh Menon goes into questions of ethics and aesthetics, and says that 'there are no easy answers; you react to [a] book on feel and emotion.' Spotlight As part of The Hindu's Out of Print series with writers, Sahitya Akademi award-winning Tamil writer Imayam was in conversation with Justice (retired) Prabha Sridevan, former judge of the Madras High Court, at The Hindu office in Chennai recently. Sridevan has translated three of his books into English. The task of a writer is to create, while the translator, in turn, breathes new life into it through another language, Imayam said. He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2021. His debut novel, Koveru Kazhudhaigal (Beasts of Burden), was published in 1994. When Imayam, the nom de plume of V. Annamalai, bagged the Sahitya Akademi award, historian and writer A.R. Venkatachalapathy wrote that the writer from the south Arcot region of Tamil Nadu had kept to his commitment of writing on what he believes in. Browser
Hindustan Times
4 days ago
- Hindustan Times
From Brooklyn to Rome: Katie Kitamura on writing, family, pleasure
Dear Reader, I wrote Audition during the pandemic, during that tension of sharing space again with people you love, having to recalibrate those relationships. That fed into the story --- Katie Kitamura (The The Booker Prize longlist is out and our most discussed book of the year is on it! For weeks we have been obsessed with this brilliantly constructed novella. What is the truth of our protagonist's life? We don't know what to believe about this New York-based theatre actor — she is an unreliable narrator for sure — but which version of herself is 'true'? There is a war on, when we read the book. 'Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience,' says George Eliot, and in a bizarre sequence of events, we watch this come true. We see a correspondence between the competing narratives in Audition and in life. On national television, Indian anchors declare they have won the war. On the internet, Pakistan claims it has won, having shot down Indian fighter jets. There is a third version as the US takes credit for a ceasefire, contradicting the Indian and the Pakistani versions. Reading Audition, we don't know what to believe. Is our protagonist really a mother — is the young man called Xavier her biological son? And can we ever truly know a person? It is thrilling when Katie Kitamura agrees to join us on Zoom to discuss her writing. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation — everything from the truth of this Booker Prize longlisted novella to how Katie met her writer husband Hari Kunzru, plus tips on how to get your children to read. Katie Kitamura on Zoom Thank you for joining us on your Friday morning. Can you tell us what you see out of your window? I am at home in Brooklyn, and when I look out the window, I see trees, which is surprising because I'm in the middle of a city, but in fact, the neighborhood where I live has these enormous, very established trees that are about five stories tall. Your parents immigrated from Japan when they were in their twenties. You were born in California and grew up living on the college campus at UC Davis. What was your childhood like? It was an idyllic childhood, full of reading. I read indiscriminately — Little Women and the Ellen Montgomery series, Anne of Green Gables, Sweet Valley High. We had a full shelf of Agatha Christie novels and my mother and I read them together. I loved reading those books and the pleasure remained even once you knew the solution. And that taught me about reading and pleasure — that it isn't simply linked to plot and narrative; fiction can feel like a world that you can escape into. You're married to the novelist Hari Kunzru; you're this power literary couple. And of course, we've read Hari's work, and we love it — and love yours too. So can we be a little cheesy and ask you how you met? We met a long time ago, at a dinner that Zadie Smith organised. I was working at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. And Zadie was a writer-in-residence, and one of the things she did as part of her program was to organize a dinner with like 20 of the most exciting new young writers in Britain, and Hari was one of them. And I was not. I was not even writing at the time. I was just working, but Zadie had asked me to help organize this and also come to the dinner, and that's when I first met Hari, and we stayed friends till we got together eight or nine years later. And then, Katie, you wrote The Longshot, and it was set in the world of mixed martial arts? It received a lot of attention and readers were fascinated with this slender young Asian woman who was once a ballerina now writing about mixed martial arts. Tell us more about this experience. I was following in the footsteps of my dad, doing my doctorate, on my way to be an academic. I had never studied creative writing. Then I had this strange thought, which was that I wouldn't follow the golden rule, which is, write what you know. I would do the inverse, and I would write what I didn't know. I would try to use the process of writing fiction as a way of learning about the world. I chose to write a very masculine novel, to write about the dynamic of a relationship between father and son. When I finished writing the book, I realised that although I had done vast amounts of research, what I had really been drawing from was not just all those hours of following fighters and going to matches and studying technique. What I was drawing on was actually my own childhood and adolescence as a classical ballet dancer, the incredibly tough physical regimen of dancing three to four hours every day. Trying to write about these men and writing about training, I was actually writing about myself and my own experiences. That was the first real lesson I learned about writing fiction, which is that you're always revealing yourself in some way. You're always drawing from your own experience, whether you like it or not. So no matter how far away from your own life you write, you always end up face to face with yourself. That was freeing and helped me to continue writing fiction. I wanted to ask you about your relationship with language. Your protagonists in A Separation and Intimacies are both translators. You also speak more than one language. For the first few years of my life, Japanese was the household language. When I was five, we spent a summer in Japan with my cousins, and everybody was speaking Japanese. When I came back to the United States, I forgot how to speak English. Soon after, when I started kindergarten, the school told my parents to stop speaking Japanese to me so that I would be able to catch up and learn English. It was a terrible mistake, and today I can see it as part of this ideological programming of assimilation. Over time, my Japanese slipped away. Today I can speak Japanese, but I cannot read with any ease, and I certainly cannot write in Japanese, which is a source of real sadness to me. But I think, in a funny way, it's something that has fed my fiction because the prose that I write is in some way haunted by another language. I'm very interested in trying to find syntax and forms of sentence structure that are perhaps outside the norm for English. I use a lot of comma splices, a lot of what would be called run-on sentences, which are not technically grammatically correct, but which wouldn't be so unusual in some other languages. There was also an experience that will be familiar to many second-generation children of immigrants. If you acquire fluency in the dominant language in a country, you're often called upon to speak English on behalf of the family. There was a period when I spoke English better than my parents, and I was the one who had to order the pizza or do whatever needed doing. I think that dynamic probably led to my interest in this question of interpretation, which I explored in Intimacies. In both Audition and Intimacies, we see multiple versions of competing narratives. What motivates you to create this kind of play? When I was a very young reader, I thought my assessment of what was happening in a book was objective. Now I understand that it varies wildly depending on where I am in my life—even where I am in my day. I realise how much of my own history and baggage is involved in interpretation. To be really honest, a book can seem much better when I've had a cup of coffee! The books that have moved me most over the course of my life are the ones that accommodate multiple readings. Take Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady—a brilliant book. When I was young, I thought it was a novel about a young woman's coming of age. Later, I saw it as a novel about the tremendous disappointment of life. It's both, of course. That mutability—how a text shifts depending on the reader—is something I wanted to explore actively in this book. That meant writing a book that felt airy, with a structure big enough for both me and the reader. I didn't want to write a book where the author knows all the answers and the 'right' reader has to guess them. I don't want that kind of relationship with my reader. I wanted the book to feel more like a collaboration. Audition, for instance, is what I call a rabbit–duck novel—you can look at it one way and see a rabbit, and another way and see a duck. Couples have come to book events and said, 'I thought it was this,' and their partner said, 'I thought it was that,' and asked which one it is. And of course, it's designed to be both. The Rabbit Duck novel How did the idea for Audition come to you? It started with a headline I saw: 'A stranger told me he was my son.' I didn't read the article—I assumed it would have a logical explanation, and that wasn't interesting to me. What fascinated me was the tension between 'stranger' and 'son.' I went for a walk with a friend of mine whose son was around 24, and I said, 'This headline preoccupies me, and I don't know why.' And she said, 'That's motherhood. Every time your child returns home, it's like a stranger has walked into the apartment.' That was really the feeling I carried into the book. We're conditioned to believe in total knowledge and intimacy between partners, and I was interested in exploring how even the most universal experiences—marriage, parenting—contain moments of profound strangeness and unfamiliarity. In A Separation, the narrator finds her husband a stranger. In Audition, it's the mother–son dynamic. And I always feel the period in which you're writing a book expresses itself in the book, even without any direct references. I wrote Audition during the pandemic, during that tension of sharing space again with people you love, having to recalibrate those relationships. That fed into the story. You are married to a fellow writer. Do you discuss each other's work? We're each other's first readers, and we want to come to the manuscript as fresh as possible. So we don't talk about our work while we're writing it. Because if I explain what I hope the novel is doing, then by the time he reads the first draft, he already knows—and he's no longer the ideal litmus-test reader. And you are all readers? It's the thing that ties our family together. At all moments, everybody would rather be reading. How did you raise your children to be readers? Our children are growing up surrounded by books, and they see us reading all the time. But it's not just that. Reading is a pleasure. Our children were always allowed to read whatever they wanted. If they asked for a book at the bookshop, we would get it. They took pride in accumulating books, just like us. We also let them find the books they wanted to read. When we've tried to give them the books we loved as children, they've resisted a bit—like when my husband gave our 12-year-old son the complete Terry Pratchett collection and said, 'You're going to love these.' He didn't. But when he finds a series on his own that feels like it belongs just to him, he devours it. As a child, I felt that reading was a private place where I could feel and know things that no one else in my family did. I try to respect that with my children. If they want to read something that feels completely their own, that's actually the best way to make reading a source of deep pleasure. A Separation is set in Greece, Intimacies in the Netherlands, and each setting feels like a character. Do you travel as a family to these places? What is the experience of travel like? I like to set my books internationally—except for Audition, which is set in New York. I'm drawn to characters who have just arrived somewhere and must figure out what it means to be there—whether in terms of behaviour, custom, or even ethics. I can't imagine life without travel, and I see my children organize their imaginations around it, too. Both Hari and I teach at New York University, which has campuses around the world—especially the one in Paris, where we teach every summer. Hari has family in India, and we took our son there when he was two. I have a family in Japan. So our children have the travel bug. Even though they're still little, they're great travellers. New places give them a sharpness of observation. And finally, tell us about your next book. It's a novel set in Rome, and it's about pleasure in a way my earlier books have not been. I did a fellowship in Rome, and we lived there for six months as a family. It's a complicated place, but one filled with many, many pleasures. Our book club conversation with Katie ends leaving us with much to think about. Like what parts of our lives are performance? Which version of ourselves is the 'real' one? And can anyone—ever—truly be known? These are just the kind of provocative questions that capture the problems of our age, thus giving Audition a well deserved place on the Booker Prize 2025 long list. (Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya's Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at sonyasbookbox@ The views expressed are personal)
