Kolkata:
It is surely a proud moment for the city, which lays its claims to three of the six authors shortlisted for the DSC award for South Asian Literature 2016. While Neel Mukherjee and Raj Kamal Jha spent their childhood and youth in south Kolkata, Anuradha Roy had a brief stint with this city when she studied at Presidency College.
“Calcutta will always enter whatever I write because that’s the city I have walked the most, got lost the most in. ‘She Will Build Him A City’ is about the imagined cities inside our head, the magic that we need to live with reality,” said Jha, editor-in-chief of a national English daily. Jha, who was born in Bihar and had his schooling at St Joseph’s, put the city in his first novel ‘The Blue Bed Spread’ where the former IITian went beyond the cordons of the concrete city. Similar seemd to be the case with his fourth novel, where humans, under strain or facing irrevocable loss, find themselves deprived even of their names. Their narratives, fragmented and with a constantly shifting relationship to any recognisable version of events, are interspersed with characters allowed to keep their nominal identities.
Neel Mukherjee studied at Don Bosco School, Park Circus and then took up English at Jadavpur University before proceeding to University College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship where he graduated in 1992. He completed his PhD at Pembroke College, Cambridge. In his second novel, ‘The Lives of Others’, Mukherjee gives us finely-grained descriptions of daily life. It is a complete world, where political unrest is always visible on the fringes, casting ever-darker shadows over the domestic. The fragmented versions of families particularly in north Kolkata is carefully penned in his novel.
Anuradha Roy, novelist, journalist and editor, has been shortlisted for her ‘Sleeping on Jupiter’. Born in Uttarakhand and brought up in Sikkim and Hyderabad, she came to Kolkata to study English at Presidency College before moving to Cambridge University. The co-founder of publishing house Permanent Black said, “I did college in Kolkata, where I made lifelong friends, and became aware of a whole cultural universe. I have wonderful memories of wandering in the second-hand bookstores and films at Lighthouse and phuchkas and rolls in New Market.”
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Kolkata / by Saibal Gupta, TNN / November 29th, 2015