Amit Chaudhuri – Year of election 2009

Amit Chaudhuri’s first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, published in 1991, won a Betty Trask Award and a Commonwealth Writers Prize. His second, Afternoon Raag, won the Encore Award, and his fifth, The Immortals, appeared in March this year. He is also a musician – a singer in the Hindustani classical tradition who four years ago established This Is Not Fusion, a project in experimental music combining jazz, blues and rock with the Indian raga. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia and was the first Indian to serve as a judge on the Man Booker International Prize.

“My first ambition,” he says, “was to be a poet, and not a novelist. But that it was the glamour of the commonplace and the music of the sentence itself that were important to me – more important than character, psychology, resolution, or narrative – came to me only during my miserable years as an undergraduate in London in the early Eighties. These seemingly Manichean dichotomies continue to govern my life in ways I couldn’t have foreseen: poetry and prose; music and language; criticism and the ‘creative’ – so that hiding, or escaping, from one part of myself is also a release into, and annexation of, another part. Eliot’s ‘escape from the personality’ was never wholly necessary or possible; since the personality itself turned out be such an unexpected labyrinth.”