HEAT Magazine in Australia has published a short-story of mine titled “Dear Editor.” It offers an account of the arrival of fascism in a remote small town in India. Read it here. Dear editor, both bathrooms at the back of the Air India flight from New York to Mumbai were out of order. The doors… Read more »
Posts By: Amitava Kumar
Conversation
I am grateful to Outlook Magazine in India for carrying my poem “Samvaad” (Conversation) both in its original Hindi and in my English translation.
2022
At the beginning of 2022, I published The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal. A joy to be read by people who had inspired me in my youth. This comment from Pritish Nandy: https://twitter.com/PritishNandy/status/1488780984061669377 It is sad that Bookforum is now gone. In the work I did in 2022, I wrote a piece on cricket… Read more »
Dilli
I am delighted to report that I will be in conversation with the marvelous graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee on December 17. Our discussion will focus on how storytelling and commentary is, in reality, a way of keeping a diary. Not just a personal diary but a public diary. A collective diary of the everyday and… Read more »
Favorite Books of 2022
Didion
I wrote a piece about the Joan Didion estate-auction in Hudson. Ten days ago, I was leading a writing workshop for faculty at the college where I teach. I was preaching the importance of devising writing prompts that take you out into the world. The discoveries you make become material for writing. A day later,… Read more »
October
The leaves are turning color and this is what I did over my October break. I have painted the foliage that I can see outside my window onto the calendar page for October. The calendar, a gift from The Bookshop in Jor Bagh, Delhi, carries a poem by Maya Angelou. One line reads “I… Read more »
Rushdie, Again
A week has passed since the attack on Salman Rushdie. Today, I published a longer essay on Oprah Daily. Why use a still from The Far Pavilions here? Read on. In the opening paragraph of his memoir titled Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie writes about first receiving the call from a BBC reporter asking for a response… Read more »
#IndiaAt75
PEN asked Indian writers to share thoughts on India’s 75th Independence Day. Here is my contribution. Go here to read the words of so many writers I admire: Kiran Desai, Suketu Mehta, Geetanjali Shree, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amit Chaudhuri, Jeet Thayil, and many, many others. These are sobering reflections on the idea of freedom—we… Read more »
An Open Letter to Hadi Matar
My open letter to Salman Rushdie’s would-be assassin in The Indian Express. Link here. An Open Letter to Hadi Matar Sub-heading: On Friday, a 24-year-old from New Jersey named Hadi Matar attacked the writer Salman Rushdie with a knife. Another writer wants the would-be assassin to know more about the man he tried to… Read more »