Reading and In Conversation: Neel Mukherjee

with drinks reception afterwards

Neel Mukherjee was born in Calcutta. He came to England to study when he was 22 years old; he never left. His first novel, Past Continuous, was published in India in 2008. It came out in the UK as A Life Apart in 2010, and won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction and was shortlisted for the inaugural DSC Prize for South Asian Fiction. His second novel, The Lives of Others, was published last year and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Costa Novel Award and the Folio Prize. Neel lives and works in London.

‘How do we imagine our place amongst others in the world?’

The Lives of Others concerns a family that is unravelling as the society around it fractures. Fired by the desire to change the world, a son, Supratik, becomes involved in extremist Maoist activism. Set during a period of extreme social and political unrest, but looping back to the early 1900s, the novel spans decades and features a large cast of characters. The Lives of Others illuminates the chasm between the generations and between the haves and the have-nots. It catches, with indelible emotional force, both the national and the domestic, class and individual, at a crossroads in a nation’s history. 

This is a Writers at York event.

Writers at York offers a lively programme of public readings and workshops, and aims to celebrate and explore the work of emerging and established contemporary writers.

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