The Grassroutes Commission is now ready. Click on this link to read the commission, a poetry sequence called Five Voices Leicester by Anita Sivakumaran. Grassroutes promotes public knowledge of Leicestershire’s diverse literary cultures. The project surveys high-quality transcultural writing by Leicestershire-based writers from 1980 to the present. It fosters local, national and international appreciation – …
Kishwar Desai
The Asian Writer catches up with Kishwar Desai, author of Origins of Love
Irfan Master
Irfan Master and I have arranged to meet at The Curve, a recent addition to Leicester’s regeneration in the Cultural Quarter. We’re in Master’s hometown. This is where he grew up, worked as a librarian, before moving to London to take up a post at the National Literacy Trust. He’s returned home, a decade later, …
Syal makes her RSC debut in Much Ado About Nothing
Writer, comedian and TV personality, Meera Syal stars opposite Paul Bhattacharjee in the RSC’s vibrant and new production set in modern day India. Audiences will step into India as soon as they enter through the doors of the Courtyard Theatre – with awnings and stalls, Indian music, and a large tree dominating the stage. Tom Piper, …
Rosie Dastgir
The Asian Writer interviews debut novelist, Rosie Dastgir
Fifty Shades of Indian Erotica: Saris and spice
Fifty Shades of Grey, a work of erotic fiction has become the fastest selling book of all time. With Fifty Shades of Grey sweeping the nation, we cross borders over to India, where not one, but two anthologies of Erotic fiction are due to be published this year. We’re caught up with Sheba Karim …
Anjali Joseph
Q. Tell us a little bit more about your second novel, Another Country? The novel opens when Leela, aged twenty-one, is in Paris at the end of the last millennium. It’s her first job after university, and begins a journey that the book follows, through her twenties in Paris, London, and then Bombay. Q. …
Nikita Lalwani
The Asian Writer catches up with Nikita Lalwani, whose second novel The Village is published this month.
Chinaman triumphs at Commonwealth Prize
Shehan Karunatilaka, author of Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew has won the Commonwealth Book Prize. The winners were announced at the Hay Festival earlier this month. The £10,000 prize is awarded annually and celebrates the best of literature written across the commonwealth. Margaret Busby, Chair of the Commonwealth Book Prize said of the winning title: “This …
Ondaatje Prize awarded to Rahul Bhattacharya
Rahul Bhattacharya is named the £10,000 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize with his first novel The Sly Company of People Who Care. (May 29, 2012). Nick Laird, Michèle Roberts and Kamila Shamsie admired ‘Bhattacharya’s verve and style as he brilliantly evokes the history and inhabitants and landscape ofGuyana’. Nick Laird said he had ‘seldom …