Tabish Khair

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Tabish Khair is an associate professor in the Department of English, University of Aarhus in Denmark.

Born and educated mostly in Gaya, India, he is the author of various books. His honours and prizes include the All India Poetry Prize (awarded by the Poetry Society and the British Council) and honorary fellowship (for creative writing) of the Baptist University of Hong Kong. His novel, The Bus Stopped, was shortlisted for the Encore Award (UK).

Previously a journalist with the Times of India, Khair continues to write and review occasionally for papers in different countries. In particular, he writes for the Hindu (India) and the Guardian (UK).

Other Routes, an anthology of pre-modern travel texts by Africans and Asians, co-edited and introduced by Khair (with a foreword by Amitav Ghosh) was published in the UK and USA in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

Khair has currently completed his next novel, ‘Filming’, which examines memory, guilt and redemption in the backdrop of the Partition of India and the 1940s Bombay film industry. It was published by Picador in July 2007 and has been greeted with acclaim in publications like The Independent (29th June 2007) and Outlook India (30th July 2007).

Extracts from reviews of FILMING:

THE INDEPENDENT, London, 29th June 2007: But this is not just a novel about movies. It shows how the dream-world of cinema, for all its distance from everyday reality, is perpetually vulnerable to the nightmares of history. Elegantly structured and taut with understated passion, Filming is a brilliant recreation of the lost world of early cinema and the continuing tragedy of religious hatred. Although set in an India that has now vanished, its delights as well as its message should find admiring readers everywhere.

OUTLOOK India, 30th July 2007: Filming is an assured and competent effort to tell a story whose strands "are entangled like the spools of a film slipping from its reel, like lengths of barbed wire.”

NEW STATESMAN, London, 26th July 2007: ...it is in keeping with Khair's pertinent and thought-provoking musings on self-deception. Khair's skill lies in making us question our own assumptions about what we do and why we do it - given that our consciousness is at times at war with our subconscious, just as India was for a time at war with itself. Khair warns us of the perils of self-justification borne of partial self-knowledge. Given our capacity for self-delusion, can we cope, this novel asks, when our dreams come true?

INDIA TODAY, 29th July 2007: Filming...[is]...a multi-narrative that intermixes straight-forward low key story-telling, flashbacks, dream sequences and action shots with admirable elan, unfurling a tale in print that mimics -- both in content and in style -- the flaming allure of the Indian bioscope...The picture that emerges may sear your soul much like your all-time favourite film.

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (TLS), London, 3 August 2007: ...an absorbing novel which is distinguished by its ambition, its structural inventiveness and its highly evocative prose.

THE GUARDIAN Review, London, 4 August 2007: Often unable to inhabit the present moment, Filming's characters tend to slide instead between traumatic memories and grandiose dreams, and it is here that the novel finds its considerable emotional force.

DAILY TELEGRAPH, UK, 9 August 2007: ...a new kind of novel, without narrative coherence, and drawing instead on historical connections and coincidences. This is definitely fiction for adults only, and a refreshing alternative to bestsellerdom...