Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri Poems

Amit Chaudhuri Biography

Amit Chaudhuri is an internationally recognized Indian English author and academic. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. Life Amit Chaudhuri grew up in Bombay. He has written numerous novels, short stories, poems and critical essays in English. He attended University College London, Balliol College, Oxford and has also been Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College. He was Leverhulme Fellow at Cambridge University, a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, and Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. His novels have won several major awards and he has received international critical acclaim. His latest book is The Immortals, a novel about music in the modern world. 2008 saw the publication of Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture, bringing together his major work as a critic. A collection of poems entitled St. Cyril Road and Other Poems appeared in 2005, and in 2001 he edited the influential The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. His study of D.H. Lawrence's poetry, D.H. Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, was called 'truly groundbreaking' by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books. His work appeared in The Guardian. Amit Chaudhuri is also an acclaimed Indian classical musician, and an internationally recognised singer and composer of Indo-Western experimental music, with an album from each of these genres. His project in experimental music, bringing together the raga, jazz, the blues, rock, techno, disco, and the Indian popular song, is called This is not Fusion, and has been performed worldwide. On March 18, 2008, he was included in the panel for the Man Booker International Prize 2009, alongside writer Jane Smiley and essayist Andrey Kurkov. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Personal Life He is married to the granddughter of Satish Ranjan Khastgir, a noted physicist, and elder brother of painter and art educator, Sudhir Rajan Khastigir. Awards 1991 Betty Trask Award and Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book for A Strange and Sublime Address 1994 Encore Award, winner for Afternoon Raag 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for A New World 2002 Sahitya Akademi Award, winner for A New World 2011 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, shortlisted for The Immortals)

The Best Poem Of Amit Chaudhuri

'Apples Still Come From Kashmir'

Apples still come from Kashmir
pale pink in crates in winter’s market.
Each grew through the year till it absorbed
the valley’s sweetness and undertaste
and reached its final shape and weight.
They are not dead, but come to fruition.
When you bite them, not blood,
but the valley’s clear juice floods your mouth.

[From St Cyril Road and other poems]

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