Writer. My Beloved Life (Knopf, 2024). Bylines: Granta, Harper's, New Yorker, NYT. Vassar prof. Guggenheim, Cullman Center Fellow. https://xitter.cf/t.co/5P2ZHwsDde
Joined November 2008
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Sometimes the book you write finds the right reader. Here is James Wood on my novel in the New Yorker magazine.
newyorker.com/magazine/2024/…
Amitava Kumar retweeted
OPEN LETTER: Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist. Her books must be available to the public. Their withdrawal from sale, on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti terror legislation, is an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for granted in this country. We categorically reject censorship - whether direct or indirect - and urge the government to change course, amending the legislation which has led us to this point of repressive absurdity.
Salman Rushdie says that the young in India have given us something hopeful.
amitavakumar.substack.com/p/…
What do the protests in Delhi mean for the rest of the world?
amitavakumar.substack.com/p/…
<गोरखपुर में का बा?>
Can we imagine a time outside this time?
amitavakumar.substack.com/p/…
Amitava Kumar retweeted
Michael Ondaatje’s best-known book, the one that made him an international star, was “The English Patient,” published in 1992. It won the Booker Prize that year, and the film adaptation won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1997. It was his early work, however, that pushed past the formal conventions of expression—and, for Amitava Kumar, became the key to understanding the novel. Reading what came before “The English Patient,” Kumar “came to value ever more the brilliance, the daring of its narrative structure, its risky use of gaps and mystery and silence.” Kumar writes about what he learned from Ondaatje’s formal experimentation—about Ondaatje’s writing and his own: newyorker.com/books/second-r…
Amitava Kumar retweeted
"Ondaatje found, in his writing, newness and, in language, a certain freedom."
Read past @CullmanNYPL Fellow @amitavakumar on the formal brilliance and daring of Michael Ondaatje:
For writers like me, who had crossed borders to arrive in the West, Ondaatje’s disregard for established boundaries taught us how to spell out our own liberation. newyorker.com/books/second-r…
Happy Independence Day, India!
Do we have toilets for everyone? Do we clean our toilets? Kiran Desai raises this question.
amitavakumar.substack.com/p/…
A poet asks if the prime minister ought to work 18 hours.
amitavakumar.substack.com/p/…
🙏🏽❤️
A mildly sad , vivacious work where the central character is a Historian working in patna.
@amitavakumar Boss kya behtareen cover hai ek waqt ko lagta hai aap hi baith kar padh rhe hai...
Amitava Kumar retweeted
We are proud to announce that Bena Sareen has won the 11th Oxford Bookstore Book Cover Prize for the exceptional cover of My Beloved Life by Amitava Kumar.
A huge congratulations to Bena Sareen for this recognition.
Spanning decades of change in India, Amitava Kumar’s story follows Jadunath Kunwar’s journey through love, friendship, loss, and history as he and his daughter, Jugnu, search for meaning in a rapidly evolving world.
@amitavakumar
@ShashiTharoor @oxfordbookstore
#BookCoverPrize #OxfordBookstoreBookCoverPrize #AlephBookCompany #AmitavaKumar #BenaSareen #BookDesign #CoverDesign
Congrats to Bena Sareen for this prize-winning cover for my book.
Thank you, @oxfordbookstore. Thank you, @AlephBookCo.
"The more I was hounded as an anti-national, the surer I was that India was the place I loved..." — Arundhati Roy
amitavakumar.substack.com/p/…
Amitava Kumar retweeted
I review @amitavakumar 's The Social Life of Indian Trains for @scroll_in
Much like his earlier works, observation emerges as the seed of literary endeavour. Through trains, Amitava Kumar captures a vivid cross-section of India’s politics, social history, and class realities, writes @sharmistha_jha.
Full review:
scroll.in/article/1090487/th…
