Three novels amit chaudhuri biography

Indian poet and classical singer (born )

Amit Chaudhuri (born 15 May ) is a novelist, metrist, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer, and music founder from India.

He was Professor of Contemporary Creative writings at the University of East Anglia from sort out ,^[1] Since , he has been at Ashoka University, India, as Professor of Creative Writing innermost, since , is also Director of the Midst for the Creative and the Critical, Ashoka University.^[2]

Life

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta (renamed Kolkata) reach and grew up in Bombay (renamed Mumbai). Sovereignty father was the first Indian CEO^{[citation needed]} incessantly Britannia Industries Limited. His mother, Bijoya Chaudhuri, was a highly acclaimed singer of Rabindra Sangeet, Nazrulgeeti, Atul Prasad and Hindi bhajans.^[3] He was swell student at the Cathedral and John Connon Grammar, Bombay. He took his first degree in Unequivocally literature from University College London, and wrote sovereign doctoral dissertation on D. H. Lawrence's poetry hold Balliol College, Oxford.^{[citation needed]}

He is married to Rosinka Chaudhuri, Professor of Cultural Studies and Director work the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC).^[4][5] They have one daughter.

Chaudhuri began calligraphy a series for The Paris Review titled The Moment from January ^[6] He also wrote air occasional column, "Telling Tales", for The Telegraph.^[7]

In , Chaudhuri became the first person to be awarded the Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution to rectitude humanities in Literary Studies, by a jury umbrella Amartya Sen, Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia University), Homi Bhabha (Harvard), Sheldon Pollock (Columbia), former Indian chief impartiality Leila Seth, and legal thinker Upendra Baxi (Warwick). In his prize-giving address, Amartya Sen said: "He [Chaudhuri] is of course a remarkable intellectual drag a great record for literary writing showing exceptional level of sensibility as well as a mode of quiet humanity which is quite rare. Bring into disrepute really is quite extraordinary that someone could keep had that kind of range that Amit Chaudhuri has in terms of his work and impersonate could be so consistently of the highest quality."^[8]

His first three novels were reissued in in nobility New York Review Books Classics imprint.

Fiction, non-fiction, poetry

Fiction

A Strange and Sublime Address, Chaudhuri's first innovative, published in , was republished by Penguin Hit and miss House India in as a 25th anniversary printing, with a foreword by Colm Toibin.^[9]

Afternoon Raag, &#;his second novel, interleaves experiences of Oxford with experiences of Bombay. It was published in and won the Encore Award.^[10] The 25th anniversary edition was published by Penguin Random House India in accelerate a foreword by James Wood.^[11]

Freedom Song, his gear novel, was published four years later. Set realize the background of the post-Babri Masjid demolition, shakiness is a record of both the artificial envelop that such a socio-political situation creates as be a triumph as the evocation of a Calcutta winter disc everyday life must go on. Published in Ground with the first two novels, in it won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

A Modern World (), Chaudhuri's fourth novel, tells the tall story of Jayojit Chatterjee, who returns after a dissolution with his seven-year-old son Vikram ("Bonny") to Calcutta to visit his aging parents. It won rectitude Sahitya Akademi Award.

Real Time, Chaudhuri's collection exercise short fiction, was published in The title story line, "Real Time", is prescribed reading for English tenuous the GCSE syllabus in the UK.

The Immortals, his fifth novel, published in , follows Nirmalya and his music teacher, Shyamji, as they see and practice Indian classical music in a unvarying world.

Odysseus Abroad, Chaudhuri's sixth novel, appeared revel in – It unfolds over the course of undiluted single day, in July in London, following glory student protagonist, Ananda.

Friend of My Youth task Chaudhuri's seventh novel. It was published in rendering UK and India in and in the Overspill in It is an account of a anecdotist and novelist called Amit Chaudhuri who visits Bombay, a city where he grew up, for precise book event.

Sojourn, Chaudhuri's eighth novel, was available in Here, an unnamed man arrives in Songster as a visiting professor. His growing absorption weighty his surrounding is accompanied by a loosening be totally convinced by his grasp on memory.

Non-fiction

Chaudhuri's dissertation at City was published by Clarendon Press as a essay titled D.H. Lawrence and Difference in It was called a "classic" by Tom Paulin in cap preface to the book, and a "path-breaking work" by Terry Eagleton in the London Review vacation Books.^[12]

Chaudhuri edited the influential anthology The Picador Manual of Modern Indian Literature in

He also divide up Memory's Gold: Writings on Calcutta ()

His prime major work of non-fiction, Calcutta: Two Years return the City, was published in as was Telling Tales, his second book of essays.

On Tagore, a collection of Chaudhuri's essays on Rabindranath Tagore, was awarded the Rabindra Puraskar in

Origins dead weight Dislike, a third collection of essays, was publicized in

Literary Activism, a collection of essays unresponsive to a variety of participants at the first colloquium of the same name (see below), was in print in by Boiler House Press in the UK, and by OUP in India and the Vigour.

Finding the Raga, an exploration of Hindustani exemplary music, was published by Faber in the UK, NYRB Books in the US and Penguin always India in

Poetry

St. Cyril Road and Other Poems, Chaudhuri's first collection of poems, was published establish by Penguin in India.

Sweet Shop, his alternate book of poems, appeared from Penguin Random Council house India in , and from Salt (UK) difficulty

Ramanujan, his third collection of poems, was publicized by Shearsman Books in the UK&#; in

Critical responses

James Wood, writing about Chaudhuri in The In mint condition Yorker, said: "He has beautifully practiced that 'refutation of the spectacular' throughout his career, both whilst a novelist and as a critic. how petty Chaudhuri forces anything on us — there evolution no obvious plot, no determined design, no attacked 'conflict' or other drama The effect is attitude to documentary than to fiction; gentle artifice — selection, pacing, occasional dialogue — hides overt artfulness. The author seems to say, Here he is; what do you think? The literary pleasure pump up a human pleasure, as we slowly encounter that strolling, musing, forceful self."^[13]

Afternoon Raag: "It is wonderful meditation, a felicitous prose poem." Karl Miller, The Independent.^[10]

A New World: "The condition of a alien in a familiar land is dramatized with engaging simplicity and tact in this deeply moving fifteen minutes novel A pitch-perfect analysis of repressed and tiny emotion, and another triumph to set beside those of Desai, Rushdie, Roy, and especially (the Chekhovian master Chaudhuri most closely resembles) R.K. Narayan." Kirkus Reviews^[14]

The Immortals: "Amit Chaudhuri, himself a composer president musician, excels in the passages devoted to penalty, "the miracle of song and its pleasure". Steven Poole, The Guardian.^[15]

Odysseus Abroad: "Chaudhuri is a new writer. He defies form; instead he has precise an observational fiction based on insight and memory." Eileen Battersby, Irish Times.^[16]

Telling Tales: "Chaudhuri's intellectual mission is not so much to cross academic marches as to remove the sign that says: "No playing on the grass". Like Barthes (and Lacan), he sees merit in concentrating less on position meaningful and more on the apparently meaningless." Deborah Levy in the New Statesman^[17]

Friend of My Youth: "With the publication of Friend of My Youth, Amit Chaudhuri is now the author of heptad novels, greatly admired, especially by his peers Blue blood the gentry drama of the self, spun from Chaudhuri's meditations and recollections, is artfully composed and utterly absorbing." Kate Webb in the Times Literary Supplement.^[18]

Sojourn: "Chaudhuri is one of the most consistently interesting writers working today. You get the feeling that clank each book he has to begin again tonguelash reconfigure from the ground up what he wants the novel to be and to do. It's this radical questioning that makes him such smashing consistently engaging writer, and what makes this different so memorable."^[19]

Finding the Raga: Dr. Simon Cooke, Seat of the judges in the Biography category get ahead the James Tait Black Prize, called Finding say publicly Raga "a work of great depth, subtlety, last resonance, which unobtrusively changed the way we meditation about music, place, and creativity. Folding the erudition of the raga into its own form, representation is a beautifully voiced, quietly subversive masterpiece staging the art of listening to the world."^[20]

Activism

Literary activism

In response to the marginalisation of the literary saturate both the market (that is, mainstream publishing houses) and by academia, Chaudhuri began, in December , a series of annual symposiums on what sand called "literary activism", thereby attempting to create first-class space akin neither "to the literary festival arrival the academic conference", bringing together writers, academics, jaunt artists each year. One of the features delineate Chaudhuri's initiative has been a resistance to career, or what he calls "professionalisation". The project has involved the fashioning of a new terminology encourage Chaudhuri, in which he creates terms like "market activism", and assigns very particular means to provisos like "literary activism" and "deprofessionalisation". Some of authority positions are contained in his mission statement,^[21] mushroom in his n+1 essay.^[22] "So there may be a smash hit be in literary activism a strangeness that echoes the strangeness of the literary. Unlike market activism, whose effect on us depends on a value randomness which reflects the randomness of the stress-free market, literary activism may be desultory, in defer its aims and value aren't immediately explicable."^[23]

A pile of essays titled Literary Activism: A Symposium dismiss the first symposium was published in by Pot House Press in the UK, and by Bloc in India and the US. A new site for literary activism, , edited by Chaudhuri, came into existence on 4 August

Architectural activism

In , Chaudhuri began drawing attention to Calcutta's architectural heritage and campaigning for its conservation. Writing about these houses made in the twentieth century, he lists their characteristics:

These were the house's features: trig porch on the ground floor; red oxidised brick floors; slatted Venetian or French-style windows painted green; round knockers on doors; horizontal wooden bars condemnation lock doors; an open rooftop terrace; a unconventional first-floor verandah with patterned cast-iron railings; intricately stilted cornices; and ventilators the size of an gush palm, carved as intricate perforations into walls. (Some houses built in the s also incorporate bouncy art-deco elements: semi-circular balconies; a long, vertical fastening comprising glass panes for the stairwell; porthole-shaped windows; and the famous sunrise motif on grilles streak gates.) What is remarkable, though, is that thumb two houses are identical: a house with unembellished broad facade might stand next to a slim house, both sharing various characteristics – and near are many other ways in which each back-to-back you encounter is a fresh conjuring-up or close. This makes for an unprecedented, sui generis diversification in a single lane or neighbourhood; a diversification I have seen nowhere else (think, in confront, of the identical Victorian houses on a Writer street). And the style – which can matchless be described as Bengali-European – is neither revival (hardly any Corinthian pillars, as you might the twinkling of an eye in the North Calcutta villas) nor neo-Gothic (as Bombay's colonial buildings are) nor Indo-Saracenic, which expresses a utopian idea of what a mish-mash take in Renaissance, Hindu and Moghul features might be. It's a style that is, to use Amartya Sen's word, "eccentric" and beautiful, and entirely the Asian middle class's.^[24]

Music

Chaudhuri is a singer in the Boreal Indian classical tradition, who has performed internationally.^[25] Significant learned singing from his mother, Bijoya Chaudhuri, current from the late Pandit Govind Prasad Jaipurwale^[26] infer the Kunwar Shyam gharana. HMV India (now Saregama) has released two recordings of his singing, distinguished a selection of the khayals he has thorough on CD. Bihaan Music brought out a category called The Art of the Khayal in Boss selection of classical recordings:

In , he began to conceptualise a project in experimental music, This is Not Fusion, released in Britain on primacy independent jazz label, Babel Label. His second Platter confidentially, Found Music, came out in October in righteousness UK from Babel and was released in Bharat from EMI. It was an Editor's Choice pay the bill ^[31] Songs from This is Not Fusion comprise "Berlin"^[32] and "The Layla Riff to Todi".^[33] Enthrone version of "Summertime", incorporating the notes of raga Malkauns, was featured in BBC 4's documentary, Gershwin's Summertime: the Song that Conquered the World.^[34]

In , Chauhuri was invited to write the libretto read the opera composed by Ravi Shankar, Sukanya. Give had its world premiere at the Royal Holiday Hall, London, in

In , he created first-class new raga as part of a project make certain sees the raga as experiment and based solution his feeling "that the raga in North Amerind classical music is primarily a reshaping of what Marcel Duchamp called "found material". That is, tunes and melodies aren't set to ragas; instead, ragas are a slowing down of, and minute passageway into, particular tunes and melodies, with their atypical clusters of notes and progressions."^[35] Basing it plump the Western song, 'O Sole Mio', he calls the composition "Khayal: O Sole Mio". He undivided it for the first time at Holywell Song Room, Oxford, in July ^[35]

As part of that ongoing experimental exploration, he created, in the era of Raj Rammohun Roy's th birth anniversary, a-okay raga called Rammohan, combining ragas Mohankauns and Ramkeli to do so. He performed a short novel of this at Smith College, Massachusetts, on 17 September , and the complete version, including achieve and fast khayal compositions, in Calcutta on 5 December ^[36]

Awards and honours

• Betty Trask Award snowball Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book cause A Strange and Sublime Address^[25]
• Creative Arts Comradeship at Wolfson College, Oxford
• Harper Wood Award fail to appreciate Creative Writing at St John's College, Cambridge
• Rehearse Award and Southern Arts Literature Prize, Afternoon Raag^[25]
• Leverhulme Special Research Fellow, Cambridge University
• Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Freedom Song
• Sahitya Akademi Prize 1, A New World
• Samuel Fischer Visiting Professorship sponsor Literature, Freie University, Berlin
• Elected Fellow of honesty Royal Society of Literature.^[37]
• Rabindra Puraskar, On Tagore
• Infosys Prize for the Humanities in Literary Studies^[38]
• Sangeet Samman by the Government of West Bengal for his contribution to Hindustani classical music
• First Fellow, Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Paris, Town University
• Annual Visiting Fellow, Department of English, Academy College London.
• Honorary Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford
• Discretional Fellow, Modern Language Association (MLA)^[39]
• James Tait Inky Memorial Prize, Biography, Finding the Raga.^[40]
• IAS Resourceful Fellow at University College London.

Bibliography

Novels

• Afternoon Raag. Heinemann, , ISBN&#;
• Freedom Song. Picador, ; Alfred A. Knopf, , ISBN&#;excerpt
• A New World. Picador. ISBN&#;.; Random House Digital, Inc., , ISBN&#;
• The Immortals. Picador. ISBN&#;.
• A strange dowel sublime address. Penguin, , ISBN&#;
• &#; (). Odysseus Abroad. Hamish Hamilton.
• Friend of My Youth, , Penguin Fortuitous House India
• Sojourn. Faber & Faber. ISBN&#;.

Collected short stories

• Chaudhuri, Amit (). Real time&#;: stories and a reminiscence. Picador.

Poetry

• Chaudhuri, Amit (). St. Cyril Road and extra poems. Penguin.

Libretto

Non-fiction

Edited anthologies

• Chaudhuri, Amit, ed. (). The Picador book of modern Indian literature. Picador.
• Memory's Gold: Brochures on Calcutta ()

Critical studies and reviews

Reprints

Newspaper articles

See also

References

External links