Articles by Saurabh Sharma
Ira Mathur: “The dead do not leave us”
At the Jaipur Literature Festival, the author of ‘Love the Dark Days’, a memoir, recollects royal betrayals and a life far from her roots
Published on Mar 07, 2025 10:48 PM IST
Dan Morrison: “This story came to me as a tangent of a tangent of a tangent ”
The author of ‘The Poisoner of Bengal’ spoke of how a news clipping got him interested in the 1933 murder of a 22-year-old prince
Updated on Feb 24, 2025 05:02 PM IST
Defne Suman: “Your body dictates fiction; fiction dictates your body”
At the Kerala Literature Festival 2025, Turkish author Defne Suman reflected on exploring Istanbul’s unwalked places and how Hatha yoga informs her fiction.
Published on Feb 18, 2025 02:10 PM IST
Jassa Ahluwalia: “The mixed story is massively underrepresented at the moment”
At the Jaipur Literature Festival, the author of ‘Both Not Half: A Radical New Approach to Mixed Heritage Identity’ spoke about the tendency to reduce an individual’s identity to fractions and the surprisingly similar reactions to his book in UK and India
Published on Feb 12, 2025 01:56 PM IST
Review: Glass Bottom by Sonali Prasad
Adeptly written and almost poetic, this climate fiction that features daughters and mothers brings the earth’s environmental crisis into sharp focus
Published on Jan 17, 2025 10:14 PM IST
Report: Madras Art Weekend
The event held in Chennai from 12 to 15 December signalled that the grand city has much to offer when it comes to contemporary art
Updated on Jan 03, 2025 07:49 PM IST
HT reviewer Saurabh Sharma picks his favourite read of 2024
A book that not only stretches the boundaries of what can be labelled fiction but also attempts to uncover the limits of reason in those celebrated for their reasoning ability
Published on Dec 20, 2024 12:37 PM IST
Review: What I Know About You by Éric Chacour
A family saga that begins in 1961 in Cairo, this debut novel, inspired by William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, is centred on a man’s quest to reunite with a lover who signalled to him life’s possibilities
Published on Oct 03, 2024 04:20 PM IST
A gendered telling of Partition
The Radcliff Line demarcating the border between the newly independent nations of Pakistan and India was announced on 17 August, 77 years ago. Large scale violence and displacement on both sides of the border in Punjab and Bengal followed. Seven recent novels by women that look at the cataclysmic event
Published on Aug 20, 2024 06:26 PM IST
Viet Thanh Nguyen — “We choose to remember and forget things ”
The Pulitzer Prize-winner on his dual identity, on memory and forgetting, and his memoir, A Man of Two Faces
Published on Aug 16, 2024 10:36 PM IST
Review: Blackouts by Justin Torres
This genre-defying novel that includes photographs, forms of erasure literature and detailed endnotes, can be read as history masquerading as fiction
Published on Aug 16, 2024 09:30 PM IST
Review: James by Percival Everett
Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Percival Everett’s James retells Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of the runaway slave who is Huck’s companion in the original
Published on Aug 09, 2024 09:09 PM IST
A reading list for #DisabilityPrideMonth
As July draws to a close, a look at five contemporary titles that centralise conversation on disability and queerness
Published on Jul 31, 2024 07:13 PM IST
On writing identity, experiencing joy, and representation
This Disability Pride Month, a look at why we need more creators with disabilities in contemporary literature and cinema
Updated on Jul 19, 2024 07:31 PM IST
Review: My Friends by Hisham Matar
The British-Libyan writer’s latest novel, which won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction this year, leverages a real life event that occurred in 1984 to examine exile, friendship, love and memory
Published on Jul 11, 2024 10:26 PM IST
Essay: A queer rite of passage
On cruising, Grindr, the gay gaze, a sudden explosion of violence and its unhappy aftermath that exposes the insensitivity of our law enforcement and health providers. A personal piece on confronting and overcoming very real fears #PrideMonthSpecial
Updated on Jun 14, 2024 10:35 AM IST
Review: Chronicle of an Hour and a Half by Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari
A deeply immersive work, Kannanari’s Chronicle of an Hour and a Half offers an engaging study of the borrowed victimhood, fragile ego, petty insecurities, territorial energy and policing nature of the contemporary Indian male
Published on May 03, 2024 09:54 PM IST
Devika Rege, author, Quarterlife – “I write to make sense of the world ”
On understanding the fault lines that shape our collective identity and her novel, which won the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters Book of the Year award in early February
Updated on Apr 27, 2024 11:52 AM IST
Review: Faking It; Artificial Intelligence in a Human World by Toby Walsh
Conveying complex ideas in accessible language, Faking It highlights the abilities and limits of machine and predictive intelligence
Published on Apr 26, 2024 07:06 PM IST
Review: Never Never Land byNamita Gokhale
An aspiring middle aged novelist who returns to her home in the hills attempts to investigate her relationship with herself, the region, and with larger forces
Published on Mar 29, 2024 07:15 PM IST
Parakala Prabhakar – “My intention is to generate a spirited debate”
During an interview conducted at the Kerala Literature Festival 2024, the author of ‘The Crooked Timber of New India’ spoke about the concerns facing the country and the need to provide a platform for criticism
Published on Mar 26, 2024 08:08 PM IST
Ashok Gopal – “For 10 years, I read only Ambedkar”
At the Kerala Literature Festival 2024, the author of A Part Apart; The Life and Thought of BR Ambedkar spoke about looking at scattered sources to put together a cohesive picture of his subject, his debt to Dalit archivists, and how 20 years of studying Ambedkar has given him a philosophy of life
Published on Feb 03, 2024 07:12 PM IST
Kailash Satyarthi – “It’s a journey we traversed from slavery to freedom”
At the KLF, Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi spoke about why he left a lucrative engineering career in the 1970s to become a social activist
Published on Jan 31, 2024 08:27 PM IST
Toby Walsh – “We fear that what we create will get the better of us”
The author of Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World on the exciting possibilities of AI and on being banned by Russia for advocacy against “killer robots”
Published on Jan 26, 2024 10:30 PM IST
Saurabh Sharma
Ian Cardozo, author, Beyond Fear - “I write to pay homage to unknown soldiers”
At the recent KLF, Major General Ian Cardozo (Retd.), the first disabled officer in the Indian Army to lead a battalion, talked about why he writes war stories
Published on Jan 24, 2024 09:14 PM IST
Saurabh Sharma
As violence rises five-fold in 5 years, friendships and politics turn communal in UP
At 5 am, Khatun Begum (50) wakes up in the loft above her pink-walled shop on the banks of the Saryu river, in Faizabad district, Uttar Pradesh (UP).
Updated on Mar 06, 2017 03:17 PM IST
IndiaSpend | Alison Saldanha with Saurabh Sharma & Sachin Johri