Dharamshala June 13 – Writer, literary critic, and lecturer Pankaj Mishra will speak on his recent visit to Tibet. Organised by the Friends of Tibet, Students for Free Tibet and Tibetwrites.org, the talk will be held tomorrow at the Lhakpa Tsering memorial hall of the Department of Information and International Relations. Born in 1969, his childhood and adolescence were spent in the Northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Mishra first graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce from the Allahabad University before completing his MA in English Literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He wrote his first novel when he was only seventeen, and two further novels followed, although none was published. Mishra is keenly interested in anything Tibetan and interacting with youths of Tibet tops the list.
In 1992, he moved to Mashobra where he began working as a literary critic for The Indian Review of Books and for the newspaper The Pioneer. His travel book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), describes the profound changes taking place in rural Indian towns.
Mishra’s breakthrough came in 1999 with the publication of his novel The Romantics. The book’s main protagonist is a young Brahmin intellectual named Samar, who stumbles upon a group of Western dropouts. The ensuing friendship provides Sama more serious look at life, and he begins an erratic journey in search of himself. The novel was an international success and has been translated into eleven languages.
Mishra contributes book reviews and political essays to a number of journals, including The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times and the New Statesman. Working as an editor for Harper Collins, he is credited with having discovered Arundhati Roy’s exceptional novel The God of Small Things. Mishra has also written an introduction to V.S. Naipaul’s latest travel book The Writer and the World: Essays. He speaks Urdu, Hindi and English.
Mishra is currently working on projects such as How to be Modern: Travels in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan (2005), The Rise of Modern India (2006). His book on Buddha entitled An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the World, is doing well all over the world. Mishra lives in New Delhi, Shimla, and London.
The organisers of the talk anticipate a book by Mishra on his visit to the Forbidden Kigdom.
