Letters to a Writer of Color with Deepa Anappara, Taymour Soomro, Amitava Kumar, and Madeleine Thien

In Conversation

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  Deepa Anappara

  Deepa Anappara

  Deepa Anappara grew up in Kerala, southern India, and worked as a journalist in cities including Mumbai and Delhi. Her debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and NPR. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian Literature. It has been translated into more than twenty languages.

  Photo Credit: Liz Seabrook

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  Taymour Soomro

  Taymour Soomro

  Taymour Soomro was born in Lahore, Pakistan. He has worked as a corporate solicitor in London and Milan, an agricultural estate manager in rural Pakistan, and a publicist for a luxury fashion brand in London. His short fiction has been published in the New Yorker, and he is the author of the novel Other Names for Love.

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  Amitava Kumar

  https://www.amitavakumar.com/

  Amitava Kumar

  https://www.amitavakumar.com/

  Amitava Kumar is a writer and journalist who was born in Ara, in India, and now teaches at Vassar College in upstate New York. He is the author of several works of nonfiction and three novels. His novel Immigrant, Montana was on the best of the year lists at the New Yorker, the New York Times, and President Obama’s list of favorite books of 2018. His new novel A Time Outside This Time was described by the New Yorker magazine as “a shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.” His most recent title, The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal, is a collection of drawings and journal entries. Kumar’s work has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, Harper’s, BRICK, Guernica, the Nation and several other publications. He has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Lannan Foundation.

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  Madeleine Thien

  Madeleine Thien

  Madeleine Thien is the author of four books of fiction, most recently Do Not Say We Have Nothing and Dogs at the Perimeter. She has received Canada’s two highest literary honours, the Giller Prize and the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and her books have been shortlisted for The Booker Prize, The Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Folio Prize, longlisted for a Carnegie Medal, and translated into more than 25 languages. Her essays and stories can be found in the New Yorker, Granta, Brick, the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and literature at Brooklyn College.

  Photo Credit: Rawi Hage