Friday, April 10, 2015
5:00pm – 7:00pm
Watson Institute, McKinney Conference Room
111 Thayer Street
Free admission
Friday, April 10th at 5:00 p.m.
Amit Chaudhuri, Literary Professor — Odysseus, Bedsits, and Lamb Curry: A Conversation with Amit Chaudhuri
McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer St.
Amit Chaudhuri is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of six novels, the latest of which is Odysseus Abroad: A novel (Knopf 2015). His novel The Immortals (Vintage, 2010) was a New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe and Irish Times Best Book of the Year. His latest books are works of nonfiction: D H Lawrence and 'Difference' (Oxford Press, 2003), Real Time: Stories and Reminiscence (Picador, 2011), Calcutta: Two Years in the City (Knopf, 2013), Telling Tales (Union Books, 2013), and is the editor of the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. Among the awards he has won for his fiction are the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Government of India's Sahitya Akademi Award.
In 2013, he was awarded the first Infosys Prize in the Humanities for his “outstanding contribution to literary studies” from a distinguished international jury including Amartya Sen, Homi Bhabha, Akeel Bilgrami, and Sheldon Pollock. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was a judge of the Man Booker International Prize. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Guardian, and is also a vocalist in the Indian classical tradition. His project in crossover music has been performed all over the world, and he has been a featured artist on flagship culture programmes on television and radio in the UK, including the Review Show (BBC 2) Late Junction (Radio 3), and Loose Ends (Radio 4). He was Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, Cambridge, a Visiting Professor at the Writing School, Columbia University, and Samuel Fischer Guest Professor at Freie University, Berlin.