Bookish Indulgences: Up Close & Personal

Showing posts with label Up Close & Personal. Show all posts

13 January, 2020

Debdatta Dasgupta January 13, 2020 0

Up Close & Personal with #Author Anand Neelakantan - @JaipurLitFest

Up Close & Personal is a series of interviews with Speakers at Jaipur Literature Festival 2020. As a preview to the big event, here are a few quick sets of warm up interviews. The main show begins on 23 Jan and runs till 27 Jan, 2020. I hope you're ready!

Anand Neelakantan is an author, columnist, screenwriter, television personality and motivational speaker. He has authored five novels in English and one in Malayalam. His debut work Asura, The Tale of the Vanquished, is based on the Indian epics of Ramayana. His next book series was Ajaya: Roll of the Dice and Ajaya: Rise of Kali based on the Mahabharata. Neelakantan has also signed a three-book series deal with the producers of the blockbuster film Baahubali. The series is a prequel to the film with Netflix already acquiring the rights.

Up Close & Personal with Anand Neelakantan

What is the one question you are tired of answering?
How did you become a writer?

What is the one question you secretly wish people would ask you?
How much hard work is writing, publishing and getting into best seller book is and how talent has very less to do with it.

Tell us your favourite literary quote.
When the writer is ready, the story appears

Recommend just ONE book.
Mahabharata

Do you think that Literary Festivals help encourage the love for reading and help lure more readers into the fold?
Not all literature fests do that. The carefully prepared ones do.

What are you looking forward to the most at JLF 2020?
To interact with the enthusiastic young reading crowd that is the specialty of Jaipur Literature Festival.

If you could invite any author (living or dead) to be on a panel with you for the fest, who would you choose and why?
Veda Vyasa. There is no one like him in the history of literature and there is no book like Mahabharata

What can we expect from you 2020?
The second book of Baahubali series, a horror thriller and a non -fiction book called Asura

Check out the Books:

Check out the Book

10 January, 2020

Debdatta Dasgupta January 10, 2020 2

Up Close & Personal with #Author Kunal Basu - @JaipurLitFest

Up Close & Personal is a series of interviews with Speakers at Jaipur Literature Festival 2020. As a preview to the big event, here are a few quick sets of warm up interviews. The main show begins on 23 Jan and runs till 27 Jan, 2020. I hope you're ready!

Kunal Basu is the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including The Miniaturist and Kalkatta, and a collection of stories titled The Japanese Wife, the lead story of which was made into an award-winning film. He has also written novels in Bengali.

Up Close & Personal with Kunal Basu

What is the one question you are tired of answering?

How do you balance your life as an author and a professor?

What is the one question you secretly wish people would ask you?

How do you manage to create completely different worlds for each one of your novels?

Tell us your favourite literary quote

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ... it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness ..." from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Recommend just ONE book

"Waiting for the Barbarians," by John Coetzee

Do you think that Literary Festivals help encourage the love for reading and help lure more readers into the fold?

Absolutely. They create an X-factor for literature.

What are you looking forward to the most at JLF 2020?

Meeting a reader who'll surprise me with a question about my writing that I don't have an answer for.

If you could invite any author (living or dead) to be on a panel with you for the fest, who would you choose and why?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

What can we expect from you 2020?

Four books and (hopefully) a film or two

Check out the books:

Check out the Book

28 December, 2019

Debdatta Dasgupta December 28, 2019 1

Up Close & Personal with #Author Vivek Tejuja - @JaipurLitFest

Up Close & Personal is a series of interviews with Speakers at Jaipur Literature Festival 2020. As a preview to the big event, here are a few quick sets of warm up interviews. The main show begins on 23 Jan and runs till 27 Jan, 2020. I hope you're ready!

Besides being an avid bibliophile, Vivek loves food and cats. An accidental writer, he indulges and wishes there was more time to write and read. A Bombay boy through and through, the sea is one of his loves. Men are also a part of his existence on and off. Vivek believes in the complete providence of fate. So Now You Know is Vivek’s debut novel.

Up Close & Personal with Vivek Tejuja

What is the one question you are tired of answering?

What was the inspiration to write your book?

What is the one question you secretly wish people would ask you?

Why a memoir and not a work of fiction?

Tell us your favourite literary quote.

“To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.” - Anne Carson

Recommend just ONE book.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Do you think that Literary Festivals help encourage the love for reading and help lure more readers into the fold?

I think they set the foundation stone, so to say. I think literary festivals are needed because people are curious about who attends and why and who are these authors and it results in people picking up a book or two. May be they won't read them immediately, but they will for sure and that's a huge change, resulting in more readers and mindful discourses.

What are you looking forward to the most at JLF 2020?

These specific sessions: Bookends: The Writer's Craft, Akbar and Dara, On Susan Sontag, This Land is Our Land, On Memoir, and Jaipur Journals. I could go on and on and on but you wouldn't want that for now.

If you could invite any author (living or dead) to be on a panel with you for the fest, who would you choose and why?

It would have to be Elizabeth Gilbert (given she is also going to be there) because there is this grace, intelligence, and a different perspective to life and living in her books. Would love to discuss her writing.

What can we expect from you 2020?

Well, honestly, even I don't know that. I am just going with the flow.

Check out the Book:

So Now You Know

26 December, 2019

Debdatta Dasgupta December 26, 2019 0

Up Close & Personal with #Author Ann Cleeves - @JaipurLitFest

Up Close & Personal is a series of interviews with Speakers at Jaipur Literature Festival 2020. As a preview to the big event, here are a few quick sets of warm up interviews. The main show begins on 23 Jan and runs till 27 Jan, 2020. I hope you're ready!

Ann Cleeves is an English crime-writer. In 2006 she won the inaugural Duncan Lawrie Dagger, the richest crime-writing prize in the world, for her novel Raven Black. The Vera Stanhope novels have been dramatised as the TV detective series Vera and the Jimmy Perez novels as the series Shetland. In addition to her crime novels, Cleeves has written a number of ghost stories to be read at Newcastle upon Tyne's Literary and Philosophical Society.

Website * Twitter * Amazon Profile

Up Close & Personal with Ann Cleeves

What is the one question you are tired of answering?

I don’t think there are any boring questions. For example, some writers dislike being asked where they get their ideas from, but I think it’s very interesting to unpick a story or a character, to dig back into my memory for the trigger to the book. I do have to answer lots of questions about the television adaptations of my novels, but the experience has been very positive, so it’s no hardship to respond.

What is the one question you secretly wish people would ask you?

This is very hard! I think I’ve been asked questions on so many aspects of my writing that it would be difficult to come up with anything new. I’m always delighted when there’s a question about libraries; I wouldn’t be a writer if I hadn’t been given the chance to borrow books for free as a child.

Tell us your favourite literary quote.

‘Only connect.’ This is from E M Forster’s Howards End and I’ve loved it since I first read it. The willingness of people with different views and ideas to come together, to listen to each other and to connect with each other seems even more important today.

Recommend just ONE book.

Any of the Maigret books by Georges Simenon. As a mystery writer, I love the exploration of a crime, but Simenon provides a master class for any aspiring novelist; his work is so spare and tight and he can set a scene, explain a character and move on the plot in just one sentence.

Do you think that Literary Festivals help encourage the love for reading and help lure more readers into the fold?

Absolutely! Reading doesn’t have to be a secret or solitary activity. Festivals give us all a chance to share our reading passions and to come across authors who might be unfamiliar to us. Reading gives us the opportunity to step inside another person’s shoes and that takes us back to ‘only connect.’

What are you looking forward to the most at JLF 2020?

Having my first taste of India. My husband visited many times – he was a professional and amateur ornithologist and loved the country’s diverse wildlife – and we always planned to go together. Unfortunately, he died before we could make the trip, so this is a wonderful opportunity for me to finally experience the country. I’m also very excited to meet readers and to find authors new to me.

If you could invite any author (living or dead) to be on a panel with you for the fest, who would you choose and why?

Another hard question… I think I’d choose the Golden Age mystery writer Dorothy L Sayers. We have a view that those authors who wrote between the world wars were all rather wealthy and conventional, but Dorothy was a strong-minded woman who had to work for a living. She also had a child out of wedlock, which must have been very, very difficult at the time. I’d ask her if her creation Lord Peter Wimsey represented her idea of a perfect man.

What can we expect from you 2020?

Another Vera Stanhope novel will be published in the autumn, and I’ll be touring with that in the UK and the US. There’ll be more television; a new series of Shetland starts filming in the spring. But of course, the highlight will be my participation in the Jaipur Literature Festival in January. I was so delighted to be invited.

Check out the Books: