For details, and to register for free, visit www.bigmarker.com/balliol/Amit-Chaudhuri-Why-I-Write-Novels
Why do we think people write novels? What happens if you spend a lifetime writing novels without being interested in categories like ‘plot’ and ‘character’? These and other questions will be explored in this talk from the point of view of one who’s neither a ‘natural’ reader nor writer of novels, but finds that they’re drawn to it repeatedly as a writer. What are the structural peculiarities of the novel that such an approach wishes to take advantage of, while ignoring the novel’s conventional requirements? Why turn to the novel when it’s possible to just as well write an essay or memoir about the same subjects?
Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962 and grew up in Bombay. He was a student at the Cathedral and John Connon School, Bombay, took his first degree, in English, from University College London, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on D H Lawrence’s poetry at Balliol College, Oxford.He is the author of seven novels, the latest of which is Friend of My Youth. His first major work of non-fiction, Calcutta: Two Years in the City, was published in the UK and India in 2013. It was published by Knopf in the US in September 2013. His first book of critical essays, the influential Clearing a Space, was published in 2008. His second book of essays, Telling Tales, was published in the UK in August 2013.Chaudhuri is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the English Association, and was a judge of the Man Booker International Prize. In 2008, a Guardian editorial about him appeared in the newspaper’s famous ‘In Praise of…’ series, the first time an Indian writer was so honoured. In its editorial, the Guardian called him ‘a publisher’s nightmare’ for his artistic impulses and experimental tendencies.
Any questions: adam.smyth@ell.ox.ac.uk