Bibliofile

Wrong Track

Here’s a heads-up about the Jaipur Literature Festival, for those going to the Pink City from the national capital by train. If you are planning to go over the weekend, lea­­ving on Friday, you won’t be able to take the Ajmer Shatabdi, the favourite mode of transport for many book lovers as it is cheap and more predictable than the highway. But curiously, the train on that Friday, January 22 is cancelled! The organisers couldn’t be contacted to find out if they had booked the whole train for the festival. The grapevine, though, had another theory: it is the government’s way of scuttling writers from attending the festival—after having returned their awards at the Sahitya Kala Akademi in Delhi.

Train The Pen

The seventh edition of the University of East Anglia (UEA) creative writing course in Calcutta, conducted by author Amit Chaudhuri and novelist Anjali Joseph, is open for selecting candidates. The course is becoming a significant platform for emerging writers—some have gone on to pursue MAs at the University of East Anglia and MFAs in the US. More importantly, others have since published works of fiction—Devdan Chaudhuri with Picador, and, now, Veena Muthuraman’s A Place of No Importance. Thomas Bell’s non-fiction book, Kathmandu, which made headlines in the London Times for its revelations about the British role in the suppression of the Maoist insurge­ncy, was also workshopped in this course. Budding writers, hurry, look up the website, there are limited seats and the selection is tough.