‘The nameplate is on the door, but no one’s home, or not the same person. Instead, in fiction as well as in the sometimes wearying business of living, discontinuity is a friend. The most everyday but still remarkable discontinuity is waking up in the morning and taking a minute to remember where I am, which country, what name…’
Anjali Joseph is a novelist and teacher of literature and creative writing
Anjali Joseph in conversation with Gabriel Gbadamosi
Anjali explores her interest in the here and now of everyday lives, the writing that makes sense of life in the smallest of details and moments, and that discloses its magic.
Biography
Anjali Joseph is interested in the power of fiction to effect everyday magic: transform a reader’s state of being, spark enlightenment, and invite a more creative engagement with their own life. Anjali was born in Bombay and read English at Trinity College, Cambridge and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She has taught English at the Sorbonne, written for the Times of India and ELLE in Bombay, and taught creative writing in Oxford, at UEA, and elsewhere.
Saraswati Park (2010) followed Bombay letter writer Mohan Karekar, and his nephew Ashish through a year in their lives. The novel won the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, and jointly won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award for Fiction in India. Another Country (2012) was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and The Living (2015) was shortlisted for the DSC Prize. Keeping in Touch (2021/2022), is a comedy that moves between Assam, London, and an unusual Suffolk pub.
