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Born and educated mostly in Bihar, India, Tabish Khair is the author of various books, including the poetry collection, Where Parallel Lines Meet (Penguin, 2000), the study, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English Novels (Oxford UP, 2001) and the novel, The Bus Stopped (Picador, 2004), which was short-listed for the Encore Award. A French translation will be out in 2010 and an Italian translation is on the anvil. His honours and prizes include the All India Poetry Prize (awarded by the Poetry Society and the British Council) and honorary fellowship (for creative writing) of the Baptist University of Hong Kong. Other Routes, an anthology of pre-modern travel texts by Africans and Asians, co-edited and introduced by Khair (with a foreword by Amitav Ghosh) was published by Signal Books and Indiana University Press in 2005 and 2006 respectively. His work has appeared in various anthologies of poetry and fiction, including The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry, City Improbable: Writings on Delhi, The New Anthem, Fear Factor: Terror Incognito, Delhi Noir and Penguin's 60 Indian Poets. Academic papers, reviews, essays, fiction and poems by Khair have appeared in Indian (Hindu, Times of India, Biblio: A Review of Books, Indian Book Review, Economic Times, PEN, DNA, Telegraph, Outlook etc), British (Guardian, New Left Review, Wasafiri, Third Text, Independent, New Statesman, First Post, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, London Magazine, P.N. Review, Salt, Metre, Thumbscrew, Stand etc), Danish (Information, Politiken, Weekendavisen etc), American, German, Italian, South African, Chinese and other publications.
Khair's latest novel, Filming: A Love Story (2007), examines memory and guilt against the backdrop of the Partition and the 1940s Bombay film industry. Ranked by Khushwant Singh as one of the best twenty novels in English by Indians or writers of Indian origin, it received positive and rave reviews in British and Asian publications and was short-listed for India's main fiction award. A Danish translation, called Film, came out in the winter of 2009 to positive reviews in the Danish press.
For further details of the new DANISH translation of Khair's FILMING, click on
http://www.ec-edition.dk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=75:film-en-kaerlighedshistorie&catid=36:skonlitteratur&Itemid=57.
Muslim Modernities: Essays on Moderation and Mayhem, a collection of topical articles by Khair written for newspapers and journals, was compiled and edited as a book by Renu Kaul Verma (Vitasta Publishers), and Khair's first illustrated book for children (The Glum Peacock) was published by Zubaan Books -- both from India in 2008.
Khair's study, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere, released in the UK and USA by Palgrave (Macmillan) in Winter 2009, has evoked much interest.
Khair's latest collection of poems (partly based on H. C. Andersen's stories), which is his first collection after the acclaimed Where Parallel Lines Meet (Penguin, 2000), will be published in India by Harper Collins in Summer/Autumn 2010. He is completing a new novel, set in Victorian London.
Khair mostly lives in Aarhus, Denmark.
MONTHLY LITERARY COLUMN by Tabish Khair in MINT (Mumbai) & The Wall Street Journal: http://www.livemint.com/articles/Authors.aspx?author=Tabish%20Khair&type=wa
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JUST PUBLISHED in the UK and USA
For further details, see http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=368170
ISBN 978-0-230-23406-2 www.palgrave.com Printed in Great Britain Cover illustration © iStockphoto.com
‘This is a fascinating, diverse and rich book which combines across the Gothic and the postcolonial in its concern with varieties of colonial and imperial Gothic “Other”, at different times, introducing a focus on the “war on terror” as a topical “hook”. Khair places the foreign Other as a central function in the Gothic in texts set both in Britain and the ex-colonies, particularly in the Caribbean, where British influence is revealed as frequently demonic.’
– Gina Wisker, Head of the Centre for Learning and Teaching, University of Brighton, UK
Starting with a re-examination of the role of the colonial/racial Other in mainstream Gothic (colonial) fiction, this book goes on to engage with the problem of narrating the ‘subaltern’ in the post-colonial context. It engages with the problems of representing ‘difference’ in lucid conceptual terms, with much attention to primary texts, and highlights the strengths and weaknesses of colonial discourses as well as postcolonialist attempts to ‘write back’. While providing rich readings of Conrad, Kipling, Melville, Emily Brontë, Erna Brodber, Jean Rhys and others, it offers new perspectives on Otherness, difference and identity, re-examines the role of emotions in literature, and suggests productive ways of engaging with contemporary global and postcolonial issues.
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