ABSTRACT
Born in Calcutta in 1962, Amit Chaudhuri was brought up in Bombay.
He came to Britain to study at University College London and then at
Balliol College, Oxford. His first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address,
was published in 1991 and his second, Afternoon Raag, in 1993. He has
received a number of awards, including the Commonwealth Writers
Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Encore Award, the Los Angeles Times
Book Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award. When this interview took
place, at the University of Alcala, Spain, he had just published Freedom
Song (1998), set in Calcutta during the winter of 1992-3 against the
backdrop of growing political tension between Hindus and Muslims; so it
is interesting that he discusses how the profound and often intimate
differences which define cultures cohabit in and influence his work. Since
1998 he has written A New World (2000) and a collection of short
stories, Real Time (2002). Chaudhuri’s latest work is D. H. Lawrence
and Difference: the poetry of the present (2003), in which he looks at
Lawrence’s position as a ‘foreigner’ in the English canon – an ongoing
critical project.
