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ASPEN SUMMER WORDS 2008
Featured Presenters: “Passage To India”
2008 ASPEN PRIZE FOR LITERATURE WINNER
Salman Rushdie
Widely considered to be both the father of contemporary English-language Indian literature and one of the finest living novelists today, Salman Rushdie is the author of ten novels, including The Enchantress of Florence; Midnight’s Children, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Satanic Verses, which won the Whitbread Novel Award and famously led to accusations of blasphemy against Islam, and subsequently a fatwa against the author.
Extended Bio |
©Beowulf Sheehan / PEN American Center |
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FESTIVAL AUTHORS
Anita Rau Badami
Anita Rau Badami is the author of three novels, including the recent Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Her debut novel was the bestseller Tamarind Mem. Her bestselling second novel, The Hero’s Walk, won the Regional Commonwealth Writers Prize and Italy’s Premio Berto. Her novels have been published in many countries throughout the world. The recipient of the Marian Engel Award for a woman writer in mid-career, she currently resides in Montreal, Canada. |
©Richard-Max Tremblay |
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David Davidar
David Davidar is an award-winning novelist and the foremost publisher of Indian writers. He is the author of The House of Blue Mangoes, a New York Times Notable Book that was translated into 16 languages, and The Solitude of Emperors, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He is president/publisher of Penguin Canada and a founding director of Penguin India. He has published several of the world’s best known authors, among them winners of the Nobel Prize, Booker Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize, including: Kiran Desai, Yann Martel, V.S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, and Zadie Smith, among many others. A graduate of Radcliffe College/Harvard University’s publishing department, he resides in Toronto, Canada.
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©Lucy Cavender |
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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the author of the bestselling novels Queen of Dreams, Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, The Vine of Desire, and The Conch Bearer (for children), as well as prize-winning collections of stories and poems. Her most recent novel is The Palace of Illusions. Her writing, which has been translated into 20 languages and included in over 70 anthologies, has won the American Book Award, two Pushcart Prizes, two PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards, and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize, among others. She lives in Houston, Texas, and teaches at the University of Houston.
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Indu Sundaresan
Indu Sundaresan was born in India and brought up on Indian Air Force bases around the country. She is the author of three novels, The Twentieth Wife, The Feast of Roses and The Splendor of Silence. The Twentieth Wife won the 2003 Washington State Book Award. Her next published work will be a short story collection set in contemporary India, due out in January 2009, and titled In the Convent of Little Flowers. She is working on her fourth novel now, set in the Mughal India of her first two novels. Her fiction has been translated and published in over 10 languages. She came to the US for graduate school, where she earned degrees in economics and operations research at the University of Delaware, and now resides in Seattle, Washington. |
© Jerry Riley |
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Manil Suri
Manil Suri was born and raised in Bombay, India. He came to the US as a student when he was twenty. His first published fiction in English was "The Seven Circles," a short story that appeared in The New Yorker. He is also the author of the novels, The Death of Vishnu, a bestseller that has been translated into 22 languages, and The Age of Shiva. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction and being named a Time magazine “Person to Watch.” In addition to being a writer, he is a mathematician, conducting research in the field of numerical analysis at the University of Maryland. A resident of Silver Spring, Maryland, he holds both US and Indian citizenship.
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(c) Jose Villarrubia |
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Shashi Tharoor
Shashi Tharoor is the prize-winning author of ten books, both fiction and non-fiction, and a widely-published critic and columnist (The Hindu, The Times of India and Newsweek). His books include the classic The Great Indian Novel; India: From Midnight to the Millennium; Nehru; and The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone. Last year he concluded a nearly 29-year career with the United Nations, culminating as the Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information. He is currently chairman of Dubai-based Afras Ventures. He was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos as a "Global Leader of Tomorrow” and he holds the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman award, India’s highest honor for overseas Indians. |
(c) Sergey Bermeniev |
Past Presenters |
