Author's Corner Archives

In 1976, China’s disastrous Cultural Revolution ended. In 1977, the system of college entrance exams, suspended in 1966, resumed. For our generation, that resumption symbolized the ending of a hopeless age. In the fall of 1978, I passed my entrance exams and went to university. I’d just left a collective farm. Like millions of others during the Cultural Revolution, we were sent to the farm to be “re-educated” by the peasant class, which Mao believed had higher moral standards. The day I left the farm was the happiest day of my life.
Posted August 21, 2008.

A bookshelf full of Indian authors will reveal certain similarities. The concerns of many novelists are similar, focused on the middle class and above (or, as the novelist Nayantara Sahgal called one of her works, Rich Like Us). Beyond the million stories India itself has to tell, there will be fiction by and about the Indian abroad. And those novels will be about Boston and Manhattan, London and the Home Counties.
Posted July 15, 2008

I have always had a healthy respect for journalists, especially those who write for daily newspapers. This is because I have always wondered how they can bear the constant pressure of churning out article after article that make sense and discuss the issues of the day with a certain depth. Facing tough deadlines, how do they do their research, synthesise information, formulate their thoughts and articulate their thinking into coherent words day in and day out?
Posted June 26, 2008

In 1969, a broad, young Nigerian man, wearing a fine black polo-neck sweater under a black leather jacket, struck up a conversation with my mother on a train journey from the east Midlands to London. He introduced himself as Obi. B. Egbuna, a writer and journalist, and I could discern from the easy smiles my mother exchanged with him and from the intensity of their discussion about West Africa, literature, and life in '60s Britain, his ability to use language as a persuasive weapon. He must have had considerable personal charm to hold her attention when she would normally have been reading, or listening to me. When, much later that year, I set eyes on his autographed books, stored alongside other fiction in our home library, a world of possibilities opened up inside me, as enchanting as a springtime parasol.
Posted June 15, 2008

Last night I dreamt I had murdered. The body was packed in the cargo of an ocean liner about to set sail. My escape was certain. Treading water, I watched as a crane hauled packages on board. But then, a single box came loose and fell into the sea. The cardboard melted away and my grisly crime was exposed.
Posted May 19, 2008

I am an Indian wannabe, I admit it. I long to look in the mirror and see dewy caramel skin, jet black hair, and raven eyes. Instead what I see reflected are the freckles passed on from my Irish ancestors, a petite frame and green eyes from my German grandmother, and perhaps more than your average amount of chutzpah from my paternal Russian-Jewish grandparents. I am quite a sight in a sari.

It’s a malady with me: I regularly fall in love with dead people. Right now, it's Melville. Last year there was Graves and Bulgakov; before that it was Kipling, Ismat Chugtai, Parker and Mohammed Vaikom Basheer. But that’s giving away too much.

My mother temporarily moved into my apartment the other week, quite without warning. She had just rented out our old house. I hesitate to call it our ancestral home because the only ancestry it bears goes back to my parents, who bought the lot in the mid-1970s. Back then it was a bit of a risk, buying property in a suburb way north of Makati, then Manila’s financial and chief commercial district.

In her book Eating India: Exploring a Nation’s Cuisine, Boston-based food writer, Chitrita Banerji, roams India in a quest for authentic Indian food. REVIEW Deputy Editor Colum Murphy spoke with Ms. Banerji at a book launch at Crosswords bookstore in Kolkata on 12 Feb. 2008.

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." So wrote Virginia Woolf in her groundbreaking 1929 essay "A Room of One's Own." As a single mother and a writer living in South Korea, I would love to tell you, dear reader, how wonderful this essay is line by line. But having neither the time nor the space, I will concentrate on my own journey as a writer and how I came to have a room of my own-indeed an entire house of my own, something very rare for a woman even in today's relatively wealthy South Korea.