Description

The narrator in these poems abandons the sectarian histories of 1990s Bombay for the relative calm of New York, only to find himself a witness to September 11, 2001. Jeet Thayils second full-length collection links images of water, addiction and forgiveness; poems that evoke multiple outsider perspectives are set in landscapes as various as Hong Kong, Doune (Scotland), P The narrator in these poems abandons the sectarian histories of 1990s Bombay for the relative calm of New York, only to find himself a witness to September 11, 2001. Jeet Thayils second full-length collection links images of water, addiction and forgiveness; poems that evoke multiple outsider perspectives are set in landscapes as various as Hong Kong, Doune (Scotland), Pashupatinath (Nepal), Bombay, and, always, New York City. About the author: Thayil is the son of the writer and editor, Padma Bhushan TJS George, who at various times in his life was posted in several places in India, in Hong Kong and New York. Thayil was mostly educated abroad. He received a Masters in Fine Arts from Sarah Lawrence College (New York), and is the recipient of grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Swiss Arts Council, the British Council and the Rockefeller Foundation. His first novel, Narcopolis (Faber, 2011) is set mostly in Bombay in the 70s and 80s, and sets out to tell the citys secret history, when opium gave way to new cheap heroin. Thayil has said he wrote the novel, “to create a kind of memorial, to inscribe certain names in stone. As one of the characters [in Narcopolis ] says, it is only by repeating the names of the dead that we honour them. I wanted to honour the people I knew in the opium dens, the marginalised, the addicted and deranged, people who are routinely called the lowest of the low; and I wanted to make some record of a world that no longer exists, except within the pages of a book.” [ 1 ] He is the editor of the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, U.K., 2008), 60 Indian Poets (Penguin India, 2008) and a collection of essays, Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora (Routledge, 2006). He is the author of the libretto for the opera Babur in London , commissioned by the UK-based Opera Group with music by the Zurich-based British composer Edward Rushton. The world premiere of Babur will take place i

The narrator in these poems abandons the sectarian histories of 1990s Bombay for the relative calm of New York, only to find himself a witness to September 11, 2001. Jeet Thayils second full-length collection links images of water, addiction and forgiveness; poems that evoke multiple outsider perspectives are set in landscapes as various as Hong Kong, Doune (Scotland), P The narrator in these poems abandons the sectarian histories of 1990s Bombay for the relative calm of New York, only to find himself a witness to September 11, 2001. Jeet Thayils second full-length collection links images of water, addiction and forgiveness;...  Read More