Latest news with #Chatto&Windus
Indian Express
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
As Kiran Desai eyes a second Booker, we remember 3 times her mother Anita Desai made it to the shortlist
Indian-origin author Kiran Desai's long-awaited new novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny has made it to the 2025 Booker Prize longlist. Kiran, who won the Booker in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss, follows in the footsteps of her mother, Anita Desai, who was shortlisted for the Booker not once, but three times. Here is a look at the trio of novels that brought Anita Desai to the cusp of the UK's most prestigious literary prize: In her Booker debut, Desai delivered a storm of a novel, Clear Light of Day (Heinemann), which explores the unspoken tensions of a family gathered in their ancestral home. The story orbits around Tara, who returns to her childhood house only to find time and memory interweaving in disorienting ways. Desai's elegant prose lays bare the emotional sediment of the past, while capturing post-Partition India with poignant subtlety. Critics hailed it as a masterclass in psychological realism, earning Desai her first Booker nod and establishing her as an essential voice in postcolonial literature. Desai's second Booker shortlisting came with In Custody (Heinemann), a wry, tragicomic look at a failed poet and a failing language. Deven, a timid Hindi professor, dreams of literary greatness through an interview with Urdu's greatest living poet, Nur. What unfolds is a series of frustrations, miscommunications, and the slow decay of idealism. Desai's portrayal of linguistic extinction and cultural compromise, rendered with ironic humor and deep empathy, proved once again her unmatched insight into India's shifting identity. The novel was later adapted into a film by Merchant Ivory Productions. With Fasting, Feasting (Chatto & Windus), Desai returned to the Booker shortlist after a 15-year gap. The novel follows the contrasting lives of two siblings. Uma, who remains trapped in her Indian family home, and Arun, who is sent to the US in search of opportunity, but finds a different kind of emptiness. In around 250 pages, Desai crafts a rich cross-cultural narrative that probes family obligations, gender roles, and consumerism. Her subtle, restrained storytelling reveals emotional repression on both sides of the globe. Anita Desai never claimed the Booker herself, but her triple shortlistings stand as a remarkable achievement in the prize's history.
Spectator
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Why are publishers such bad judges when it comes to their own memoirs?
'The publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar,' Arthur Koestler once declared. For some reason this put-down has never stopped publishers from fathering their memoirs, and the book trade titan's life and times used to be as much a staple of the library shelf as slim volumes of nature poetry. As in other branches of life-writing, the procedural approach tends to vary. There are practical primers – Stanley Unwin's The Truth about Publishing, say, from the year of the general strike, or Anthony Blond's The Publishing Game (1971); there are delightful vagaries in the style pioneered by Grant Richards's Author Hunting (1934); and there is the emollient, if not absolutely vainglorious, reminiscence, most recently on display in Tom Maschler's Publisher (2005). That such books no longer seem to make it on to publishers' lists has an economic explanation – they don't sell and are essentially vanity projects – but also a structural underpinning. Here, in a more corporate age, the big beasts of old-style publishing, those legendary autodidacts and self-made bruisers who trampled on their competitors like so much chaff, are most of them gone. The days when Chatto & Windus's Carmen Callil could run her firm at a loss that exceeded its annual turnover seem as remote as the Battle of Lepanto. Anthony Cheetham, the author of this slim, reticent yet lavishly produced volume, is a major player. In fact a glance at the CV laid out in successive chapters of A Life in Fifty Books reveals that among the handful of survivors capable of writing a history of British publishing since the mid-1960s, he is the best qualified of all.
CBC
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Margaret Atwood's first memoir, Book of Lives, to be published in November 2025
Acclaimed Canadian author Margaret Atwood is finally sharing her life's story in the long-awaited Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts. Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts will be published by McClelland & Stewart on Nov. 4, 2025 in Canada. Doubleday and Chatto & Windus will publish the book in the U.S., and the U.K., respectively. Atwood, 85, the author of The Handmaid's Tale and two-time Booker Prize winner, described the challenges of writing her memoir in a press statement. "I sweated blood over this book — there was too much life to stuff in, and if I'd died at 25 like John Keats, it could have been shorter — but I also laughed a lot," she wrote. "A memoir is what you can remember, and you remember mostly stupid things, catastrophes, revenges, and times of political horror, so I put those in — but I also added moments of joy, and surprising events and, of course, the books. I hope you'll have as much fun reading Book of Lives as I did writing it." 85 surprising facts about Margaret Atwood Atwood is a celebrated writer who has published fiction, nonfiction, poetry and comics. She began her writing career with poetry, publishing The Circle Game and winning the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry in the late 1960s. She's since published more than a dozen poetry collections, including The Journals of Susanna Moodie in 1970, Power Politics in 1971 and, most recently, Paper Boat in 2024. She has won several awards for her work including the Governor General's Literary Award, the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Writer in the World Prize. In Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, she recounts her early life with her entomologist father and dietician mother, who spent most of the year in the forest in Northern Quebec, her rise to literary stardom and the defining cultural and political moments that shape her writing. Through her stories, readers will notice the connections between art and real life and get insight into the mind of one of Canada's most celebrated writers.
