Nepal and Pan-Nepalese Identity: A Conversation with Samrat Upadhyay, by Koushik Goswami

Interviews For many years, better opportunities on foreign shores, political turmoil, and the Maoist insurgency in Nepal have contributed to a large-scale migration to foreign countries. Many Nepalese writers, now settled in the West, have begun writing anglophone fiction and nonfiction about Nepal and its sociocultural history. Manjushree Thapa, Rabi Thapa, Chandra Gurung, and Samrat Upadhyay are some of the notable authors writing now. I engaged in a conversation with Upadhyay via email over the course of three months. Born and raised in Nepal, Upadhyay is a Nepali diasporic author currently settled in the US. He is a Distinguished Professor of English and Martha C. Kraft Professor of Humanities at Indiana University, Bloomington. His works include Arresting God in Kathmandu (2001), The Guru of Love (2003), The Royal Ghosts (2006), Buddha’s Orphans (2010), The City Son: A Novel (2014), and Mad Country (2017). The first Nepalese writer to be published in the West, he won the Whiting Award for his debut book, Arresting God in Kathmandu, a collection of nine stories based on Nepal. His first full-length novel, The Guru of Love, was a New York Times Notable book of the year 2003. In 2007 he won the Asian American Literary Award for The Royal Ghosts. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Tamara Straus compared Upadhyay to a “Buddhist Chekhov.” Koushik Goswami: What prompts you to write in English about Nepali life and culture? This is a... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2022-02-14 22:32:24 UTC ]

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