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| Edited By: Kaartikeya Bajpai |Source: DNA webdesk |Updated: Jan 01, 2015, 04:23 PM IST
The first thing that you notice on Amit Chaudhuri’s website is the demarcation: Writing and Music. A novelist, academic and a trained, and critically acclaimed singer in the North Indian classical tradition, he is also a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia.
He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, India's highest literary honor, in 2002 for his novel 'A New World' and has the Commonwealth Literature Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize to his credit as well. In what has been a very illustrious career, Amit has written five novels, one work of non-fiction and a number of books on literary criticism. Being the highly respected critic he is, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of literature at the same time he conceptualised a project in experimental music, ‘This is Not Fusion,’ which received great critical acclaim.
Latest Book: His latest work is 'Odysseus Abroad', a modern day re-telling of Odysseus and Telemachus. It is a novel about a young man and an old man, about friendship, loneliness and love. A tender and ribald writing style cements the often mentioned likeliness of his work to Marcel Proust’s, French novelist and critic. Largely unsentimental and wry, 'Odysseus Abroad' is set in the London of 1980s.
Ian Jack, the former editor of Granta magazine, once said about him: "You feel that he's not trying to describe 'India', but certain people in a certain place at a certain time. His books are about particularising things and people. They're calm. Details of behaviour and scene are memorably well done. Domestic life is shown to be subtle and complicated."
Quirky Fact: In an event in New York, he once spoke with the English philosopher Simon Critchley at the Rubin Museum about 'nothing' and then gave a concert with his band.
