The School of Oriental and African Studies - University of London

Southeast Asian Literature Event: Tash Aw and Preeta Samarasen in conversation with Pankaj Mishra

Speaker Biography

Pankaj Mishra 
Pankaj Mishrawas born in North India in 1969. He 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 years old, and two further novels followed, although none have been published.

In 2005, Mishra published an anthology of writing on India titled India in Mind (Vintage). His writings have been anthologized in The Picador Book of Journeys (2000), The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (2004), and Away: The Indian Writer as Expatriate (Penguin), among other titles. He has introduced new editions of Rudyard Kipling's Kim (Modern Library), E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (Penguin Classics), J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (NYRB Classics), Gandhi's The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Penguin)  and R. K. Narayan's The Ramayana (Penguin Classics). He has also introduced two volumes of V.S. Naipaul's essays, The Writer and the World and Literary Occasions.

Mishra writes literary and political essays for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and the New Statesman, among other American, British, and Indian publications. His work has also appeared in the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Time, The Independent, Granta, The Nation, N+1, Poetry, Common Knowledge, Outlook, Travel & Leisure, The New Yorker, and Harper's.  He was a visiting professor at Wellesley College in 2001, 2004, and 2006. In 2004-2005 he received a fellowship at the Cullmen Center for Writers and Scholars, New York Public Library. He divides his time between London and India, and is presently working on a novel. 

Preeta Samarasan
Preeta Samarasan was born in Malaysia and moved to the United States to finish high school at the United World College U.S.A, and attend Hamilton College.  She was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in musicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, and had begun work on a dissertation on Gypsy music festivals in France when she left to complete her novel.  She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where an earlier version of Evening Is The Whole Day won the Avery and Jule Hopwood Novel Award.  She also recently won the Asian American Writer's Workshop/Hyphen Magazine short-story award.

Her short fiction and nonfiction has been published or is forthcoming in the Asian Literary Review, Five Chapters, Hyphen, the Michigan Quarterly Review, EGO Magazine, A Public Space, and in the anthology Urban Odysseys: KL Stories.

Tash Aw

Tash Aw was born in Taipei to Malaysian-Chinese parents and grew up in Kuala Lumpar. He moved to England at 18 to attend university, where he studied Law at Cambridge and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He first began work on The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) in the evenings and at weekends until, in 2002, he left his job as a lawyer to work on the novel full time. It was finished a year later, nearly five years after Aw began the book. The Harmony Silk Factory won the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, as well as being long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Tash Aw is now a full time writer. His second novel Map of the Invisible World, set in post independence Malaysia and Indonesia, will be published in May 2009.