Nilanjana S Roy | writer | editor | columnist
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Black River
“The air crackles with dreams. Most of them are doomed to failure, but as soon as one unspoken dream dies, a thousand other migrants arrive with theirs, filling the air with a current of unceasing hope and burning longing.” Black River, now out in bookstores
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Our Freedoms: an anthology of stories, essays and poems on liberty
Buy Our Freedoms at Juggernaut “With the idea of freedom becoming a distant memory with each passing day, it is difficult to describe the tenor of disquieting times like this. The recently-published anthology Our Freedoms does just that while amplifying voices that hope to make India’s constitutional morality unfailingly stronger. Edited by columnist Nilanjana S. Roy,…
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About
Nilanjana S Roy is the author of Black River, noir fiction that explores the aftermath of a terrible murder in the border village of Teetarpur, and grief, love and friendship in times of ferment and rising tensions. She has also published two award-winning fantasy novels (The Wildings and The Hundred Names of Darkness) and a…
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The Wildings: Mara’s story
Mara’s story She was an orange kitten with deep green eyes, no bigger than the palm of my partner’s hand. Mara had been rescued from a drain in Sujan Singh Park by my cousin, and was temporarily living with them and their three dogs. “We have to find someone to adopt her!” said Kamini. “Yes,”…
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The Girl Who Ate Books
“The two of us loved books and reading and authors for no good reason except that it had been encoded in our DNA by the previous generations, because we had lived in homes where everyone read books, as a matter of course. My father had grown up in a small town with a tiny…
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The Hundred Names of Darkness
“A delight to read. Eliot’s Old Possum would have enjoyed these Practical Indian Cats.” Salman Rushdie In the sequel and conclusion to her critically acclaimed, internationally bestselling novel, The Wildings, Nilanjana Roy takes us back to the Delhi neighbourhood of Nizamuddin, and its unforgettable cats–Mara, Southpaw, Katar, Hulo and Beraal. As they recover slowly…
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Book review: Victory City
(First published in the Indian Express: read more) Victory City Salman Rushdie Penguin Random House 338 pages Rs 699 Nothing lasts. Empires crumble without leaving traces behind, much of human history is unrecorded, libraries burn, and storytellers and poets through time have lived precarious lives — shot, burned at the stake, murdered by tyrants, brutally…
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Joan Didion and writing
In the 1970s, Joan Didion did an interview with Tom Brokaw. “It’s the only aggressive act I have,” she says of writing. “It’s the only way I can be aggressive.” Didion died this week at the age of 87, leaving behind a towering legacy as a journalist, a memoir writer, a novelist. Over the years,…
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Black River, and endings
When is a novel done? When you know that you have to let go of these characters — these people, their lives, their landscapes, their hopes, their unspoken dreams and wishes, their griefs and heartbreaks, their struggles, their failures, the moments of transition and transcendence — and you are finally at peace with that.
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Neil Gaiman on kindness
From a recent interview with Neil Gaiman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtTDvzyr3m4 Towards the end of our chat, I asked: “You’ve said this consistently for 20, 30 years: Be Kind. Why is kindness so important for writers and creators?”I loved Gaiman’s answer: “Because there’s lots of other people out there saying the other stuff, and because there aren’t enough…
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The Modern Review: August 15, 1947, Dawn of a New Age
(Note: The Modern Review archives run from 1907, when it was founded by Ramananda Babu, to the 1960s. Since this volume was intended to commemorate Ramananda Chatterjee, we looked only at volumes published between 1907 to 1943, the year of his death, and included a few articles from the August 1947 issue as well.…
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Sundays with The Modern Review
(Note: The Modern Review archives run from 1907, when it was founded by Ramananda Babu, to the 1960s. Since this volume was intended to commemorate Ramananda Chatterjee, we looked only at volumes published between 1907 to 1943, the year of his death, and included a few articles from the August 1947 issue as well. Patriots,…
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A seat at the table
Where I grew up, we were taught – or we didn’t have to learn, it was in the air, something you could catch like a virus that settled in your gut – to pay attention to men. If those men were geniuses, then they were owed more than your attention. Adulation, or an unquestioned acceptance…
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Sundays with The Modern Review: Tagore and Gandhi
(Note: The Modern Review archives run from 1907, when it was founded by Ramananda Babu, to the 1960s. Since this volume was intended to commemorate Ramananda Chatterjee, we looked only at volumes published between 1907 to 1943, the year of his death, and included a few articles from the August 1947 issue as well. Patriots,…
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