Articles by Saurabh Sharma
A gendered telling of Partition
The Radcliff Line demarcating the border between the newly independent nations of Pakistan and India was announced on 17 August, 77 years ago. Large scale violence and displacement on both sides of the border in Punjab and Bengal followed. Seven recent novels by women that look at the cataclysmic event
Published on Aug 20, 2024 06:26 PM IST
Viet Thanh Nguyen — “We choose to remember and forget things ”
The Pulitzer Prize-winner on his dual identity, on memory and forgetting, and his memoir, A Man of Two Faces
Published on Aug 16, 2024 10:36 PM IST
Review: Blackouts by Justin Torres
This genre-defying novel that includes photographs, forms of erasure literature and detailed endnotes, can be read as history masquerading as fiction
Published on Aug 16, 2024 09:30 PM IST
Review: James by Percival Everett
Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Percival Everett’s James retells Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of the runaway slave who is Huck’s companion in the original
Published on Aug 09, 2024 09:09 PM IST
A reading list for #DisabilityPrideMonth
As July draws to a close, a look at five contemporary titles that centralise conversation on disability and queerness
Published on Jul 31, 2024 07:13 PM IST
On writing identity, experiencing joy, and representation
This Disability Pride Month, a look at why we need more creators with disabilities in contemporary literature and cinema
Updated on Jul 19, 2024 07:31 PM IST
Review: My Friends by Hisham Matar
The British-Libyan writer’s latest novel, which won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction this year, leverages a real life event that occurred in 1984 to examine exile, friendship, love and memory
Published on Jul 11, 2024 10:26 PM IST
Essay: A queer rite of passage
On cruising, Grindr, the gay gaze, a sudden explosion of violence and its unhappy aftermath that exposes the insensitivity of our law enforcement and health providers. A personal piece on confronting and overcoming very real fears #PrideMonthSpecial
Updated on Jun 14, 2024 10:35 AM IST
Review: Chronicle of an Hour and a Half by Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari
A deeply immersive work, Kannanari’s Chronicle of an Hour and a Half offers an engaging study of the borrowed victimhood, fragile ego, petty insecurities, territorial energy and policing nature of the contemporary Indian male
Published on May 03, 2024 09:54 PM IST
Devika Rege, author, Quarterlife – “I write to make sense of the world ”
On understanding the fault lines that shape our collective identity and her novel, which won the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters Book of the Year award in early February
Updated on Apr 27, 2024 11:52 AM IST
Review: Faking It; Artificial Intelligence in a Human World by Toby Walsh
Conveying complex ideas in accessible language, Faking It highlights the abilities and limits of machine and predictive intelligence
Published on Apr 26, 2024 07:06 PM IST
Review: Never Never Land byNamita Gokhale
An aspiring middle aged novelist who returns to her home in the hills attempts to investigate her relationship with herself, the region, and with larger forces
Published on Mar 29, 2024 07:15 PM IST
Parakala Prabhakar – “My intention is to generate a spirited debate”
During an interview conducted at the Kerala Literature Festival 2024, the author of ‘The Crooked Timber of New India’ spoke about the concerns facing the country and the need to provide a platform for criticism
Published on Mar 26, 2024 08:08 PM IST
Ashok Gopal – “For 10 years, I read only Ambedkar”
At the Kerala Literature Festival 2024, the author of A Part Apart; The Life and Thought of BR Ambedkar spoke about looking at scattered sources to put together a cohesive picture of his subject, his debt to Dalit archivists, and how 20 years of studying Ambedkar has given him a philosophy of life
Published on Feb 03, 2024 07:12 PM IST
Kailash Satyarthi – “It’s a journey we traversed from slavery to freedom”
At the KLF, Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi spoke about why he left a lucrative engineering career in the 1970s to become a social activist
Published on Jan 31, 2024 08:27 PM IST
Toby Walsh – “We fear that what we create will get the better of us”
The author of Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World on the exciting possibilities of AI and on being banned by Russia for advocacy against “killer robots”
Published on Jan 26, 2024 10:30 PM IST
Saurabh Sharma
Ian Cardozo, author, Beyond Fear - “I write to pay homage to unknown soldiers”
At the recent KLF, Major General Ian Cardozo (Retd.), the first disabled officer in the Indian Army to lead a battalion, talked about why he writes war stories
Published on Jan 24, 2024 09:14 PM IST
Saurabh Sharma