Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri (born 1962 Calcutta) is an internationally recognized Indian English author and academic. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.^[1] In 2012, Chaudhuri won the Infosys Prize for Humanities-Literary Studies for his imaginative and illuminating writings in literary criticism, which reflect a complex literary sensibility, and great theoretical mastery, along with a probing sense of detail.

Life

Amit Chaudhuri at the Kolkata Book Fair, 2014.

Amit Chaudhuri grew up in Bombay. He attended University College London, Balliol College, Oxford and has also been Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College. He was Leverhulme Fellow at Cambridge University, a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, and Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Freie Universität Berlin.

He has written numerous novels, short stories, poems and critical essays in English. His novels have won several major awards and he has received international critical acclaim. His latest book is The Immortals, a novel about music in the modern world. 2008 saw the publication of Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture, bringing together his major work as a critic. A collection of poems entitled St. Cyril Road and Other Poems appeared in 2005, and in 2001 he edited the influential The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. His study of D.H. Lawrence's poetry, D.H. Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, was called 'truly groundbreaking' by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books.^[2] He writes frequently for The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Guardian. His work has appeared in Granta, The New Left Review, The Dublin Review, Bricks, N+1, Caravan and many other periodicals. ^[3]

Amit Chaudhuri is also an acclaimed Indian classical musician, and an internationally recognised singer and composer of Indo-Western experimental music, with an album from each of these genres. His project in experimental music, bringing together the raga, jazz, the blues, rock, techno, disco, and the Indian popular song, is called This is not Fusion, and has been performed worldwide. A second album, Found Music, was brought out by EMI in 2011.

On March 18, 2008, he was included in the panel for the Man Booker International Prize 2008, alongside writer Jane Smiley and essayist Andrey Kurkov. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Personal life

He is married to Rosinka Chaudhuri, Prof. in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She is the daughter of Shiva Ranjan and Sreelata Khastgir and granddaughter of Satish Ranjan Khastgir, a noted physicist, and elder brother of painter and art educator Sudhir Rajan Khastgir ^[4]

Awards

• 1991 Betty Trask Award and Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book for A Strange and Sublime Address
• 1994 Encore Award, winner for Afternoon Raag
• 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Freedom Song
• 2002 Sahitya Akademi Award, winner for A New World
• 2011 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, shortlisted for The Immortals
• 2012 Rabindra Puraskar for On Tagore
• 2012 Infosys Prize for contemporary Literature.

Works

Novels

• A Strange and Sublime Address, 1991; Minerva, 1992, ISBN 978-0-7493-9961-0
• Afternoon Raag, Heinemann, 1993, ISBN 978-0-434-12349-0
• Freedom Song, Picador, 1998; Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, ISBN 978-0-375-40427-6 excerpt
• A New World. Picador. 2000. ISBN 978-0-375-41093-2. ; Random House Digital, Inc., 2002, ISBN 978-0-375-72480-0
• The Immortals. Picador. 2009. ISBN 978-0-307-27022-1. 

Short stories

• Real Time: Stories and a reminiscence, Picador, 2002, ISBN 978-0-330-49130-3

Poetry

• St. Cyril Road and Other Poems (Penguin, 2005)

Non fiction

• D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present (Oxford, 2003)
• Small Orange Flags (Seagull, 2003) reviewed
• Clearing A Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture. Peter Lang. 2008. ISBN 978-1-906165-01-7. 

Anthologies

• Picador/Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001)
• Memory's Gold: Writings on Calcutta (2008)

Notes

External links

• ‘Surpanakha’ story at The Little Magazine
• The Writers a poem from The Observer
• "An unlikely radical", The Hindu
• A date with Amit Chaudhuri

Interviews

• Interview with Amit Chaudhuri, Oxonian Review, April 2009
• "I Wish Indian Writing in English Were Less Triumphant" Deutsche Welle
• Transcript of interview with Ramona Koval, The Book Show, ABC Radio National, 20 November 2007