nilanjana s roy

Month: July 2009

  • The BS Column: Five Lessons from the Teacher Man

    (Published in the Business Standard, July 20, 2009. There are some writers you respect chiefly for the calibre of their work; what they’re like as human beings is almost irrelevant. And there are some writers who become important to you because their work reflects their personality: in Frank McCourt’s case, I loved his writing not…

  • The 2009 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize: call for nominations

    The Shakti Bhatt Foundation invites nominations for the 2009 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize.Last year’s winner was Pakistani novelist Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes. • Entries may be in any genre: poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction (travel writing, autobiography, biography, and narrative journalism), and drama.• All authors from the subcontinent are eligible but their…

  • The Crossword Award: translators

    Translators, briefly profiled–Prema Jayakumar (“There has to be an emotional involvement”) and Ira Pande: “It seems to me that each time we present a book as a translated work, we offer an apology for writing in a language that is not the globalised and the mainstream one. This shows a terrible lack of faith in…

  • The Ishiguro Album

    “The mere fact that she was listening to him seemed to draw fresh layers from his imagination, and in the hours between these afternoon sessions, he’d often find himself preparing a piece in his mind, anticipating her comments, her shakes of the head, her frown, the affirming nod, and most gratifying of all, those instances…

  • Vandana Singh on SF and the end of the world

    Vandana is one of India’s best SF writers. Not best-known; best. So when she says she thinks the end of the world might be closer than we realise, I’m listening. (Courtesy Anita Roy). What I’m calling for is a dialogue among SF writers about climate change. Not an argument about whether it is real or…

  • Got (good) poetry?

    Passing this on, courtesy Sridala Swami: The inaugural Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize.The Prize was instituted by the Srinivas Rayaprol Literary Trust to recognize excellence in poetry written in English and is being administered jointly by the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. The prize consisting of a cash award of Rs.10, 000 and a citation…

  • Daniyal Mueenuddin @ Random House blog

    The Random House India blog offers a new short story by Daniyal Mueenuddin: Peering into the gloom, Mustafa saw a figure with a short torso and bent legs thin as a man’s wrist, topped by enormous knees. It hopped and twisted along on strong arms, bulbous knees upright and cradled on its chest, resting between…

  • The BS column: Make mine a memorizer

    (Published in the Business Standard, July 13, 2009, in a fit of frustration at the quality of e-readers on the market. Quick summary: “What kind of reading revolution can you usher in with blunt swords such as these etc?”) In A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller imagined a world where reading was banned, books contraband,…

  • The BS Column: Gunfight at the I’m-Not-OK Corral

    (Published in the Business Standard, 8th July, 2009) “Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron.” It was the first of 27 tweets—short, messages uploaded on a Twitter feed—that the writer Alice Hoffman posted last week, in response to an unenthusiastic review of her book by Silman. Over the next few hours, Hoffman fumed,…

  • Kolkata, Calcutta

    (Published in Geo India, July 2009, as a photo-essay, with many more photographs. Pictures by Saibal Das, who spent two years trying to understand and capture North Kolkata.) On some summer days, North Kolkata shimmers before your eyes like a mirage: and often, once the heat has subsided, you look again and see that another…