Jeet Thayil

Jeet Thayil (born 13 October 1959) is an Indian poet,[1] novelist, librettist and musician. He is best known as a poet and is the author of four collections: These Errors Are Correct (Tranquebar, 2008), English (2004, Penguin India, Rattapallax Press, New York, 2004), Apocalypso (Ark, 1997) and Gemini (Viking Penguin, 1992). His first novel, Narcopolis, (Faber & Faber, 2012), which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature,[2] was also shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize[3] and The Hindu Literary Prize.[4][5]

Jeet Thayil
Jeet Thayil kicking it at Goobe's Book Republic, Bangalore.
Born (1959-10-13) 13 October 1959
Kerala, India
OccupationAuthor, poet
LanguageEnglish
Notable worksNarcopolis (Faber & Faber, 2012)
Notable awardsSahitya Akademi Award

Early life and career

Born in Kerala, Thayil is the son of the author and editor T. J. S. George, who at various times in his life was posted in several places in India, in Hong Kong and New York. Thayil was mostly educated abroad. He received a Masters in Fine Arts from Sarah Lawrence College (New York), and is the recipient of grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Swiss Arts Council, the British Council and the Rockefeller Foundation.

His first novel, Narcopolis (Faber, 2011), is set mostly in Bombay in the 1970s and '80s, and sets out to tell the city's secret history, when opium gave way to new cheap heroin. Thayil has said he wrote the novel: "to create a kind of memorial, to inscribe certain names in stone. As one of the characters [in Narcopolis] says, it is only by repeating the names of the dead that we honour them. I wanted to honour the people I knew in the opium dens, the marginalised, the addicted and deranged, people who are routinely called the lowest of the low; and I wanted to make some record of a world that no longer exists, except within the pages of a book."[6]

He is the editor of the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, UK, 2008), 60 Indian Poets (Penguin India, 2008) and a collection of essays, Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora (Routledge, 2006). His poetry is included in Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry (United States, 2015).[7]

He is the author of the libretto for the opera Babur in London, commissioned by the UK-based Opera Group with music by the Zürich-based British composer Edward Rushton.[8] The world premiere of Babur took place in Switzerland in 2012, followed by tours to the United Kingdom (performed at theatres in London and Oxford) and India. At the work's core is an exploration about the complexities of faith and multiculturalism in modern-day Britain. Its action hinges on an imagined encounter between a group of religious fundamentalists and the ghost of Babur, who challenges their plans for a suicide strike.[8]

Thayil is also known as a performance poet and musician. As a songwriter and guitarist, he is one half of the contemporary music project Sridhar/Thayil (Mumbai, New Delhi).[9]

Thayil was also a guitarist for the psychedelic rock band Atomic Forest in the early 1980s for a brief period.

In 2006 he told the Indian newspaper The Hindu that he had been an alcoholic (like many of the Bombay poets) and an addict for almost two decades: "I spent most of that time sitting in bars, getting very drunk, talking about writers and writing. And never writing. It was a colossal waste. I feel very fortunate that I got a second chance." These days, he says, the only addictions he has are poetry and coffee. "Coffee's much easier to get than heroin."[10]

He has worked as a journalist in New York, Mumbai and Bangalore.

Awards and honours

In 2012, Thayil's poetry collection These Errors are Correct was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for English.[11] He was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 and The Hindu Literary Prize (2013) for his debut novel Narcopolis.[3][4] In 2013, Thayil became the first Indian author to win the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, worth $50,000, for the novel Narcopolis.[2]

Style

The Indian poet Dom Moraes, in his introduction to Thayil's first book of poems (with poet Vijay Nambisan), Gemini, said that Thayil did not trouble his mind with the concerns of many Indian poets, their Indianness, that he did not make statements that were irrelevant to his work, that his concerns were mainly personal. Thayil, Moraes said, "works his feelings out with care, through colourations of mood rather than through explicit statements."[12][13]

His idiom is the result of a cosmopolitan blend of styles, and is yet, quite clearly, his own. About Narcopolis, Thayil said, "I've always been suspicious of the novel that paints India in soft focus, a place of loved children and loving elders, of monsoons and mangoes and spices. To equal Bombay as a subject you would have to go much further than the merely nostalgic will allow. The grotesque may be a more accurate means of carrying out such an enterprise."[6]

Thayil, writes a reviewer for Indian Book Critics, is good when he writes without personal exertions (review for Collected Poems).[14]

Bibliography

Poetry
  • Collected Poems, Aleph Book Company, New Delhi, 2015. ISBN 978-9384067434
  • These Errors Are Correct, Tranquebar Books (EastWest and Westland), Delhi, 2008. ISBN 978-8189975425
  • English, Penguin, Delhi and Rattapallax Press, New York, 2004. ISBN 1-892494-59-0
  • Apocalypso, Aark Arts, London, 1997, ISBN 1-899179-01-1
  • Gemini, Penguin-Viking, New Delhi, 1992. (two-poet volume ), ISBN 0-670-84524-8

Fiction
  • Narcopolis, Faber and Faber, London, 2012, ISBN 978-0-571-27576-2
  • The Book of Chocolate Saints, Aleph, 2017, ISBN 978-9386021038
  • Low, Faber and Faber, 2020, ISBN 978-0571360727

As an editor
  • The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, Bloodaxe UK, 2008 ISBN 1-85224-801-7
  • 60 Indian Poets, Penguin India, 2008.
  • Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora, Routledge, 2006
  • Give the Sea Change and It Shall Change: 56 Indian Poets, Fulcrum, 2005
  • Vox2: Seven Stories, Sterling Newspapers, India, 1997

References
  1. "Sahitya Akademi : Who's Who of Indian Wiriters". Sahitya Akademi. Sahitya Akademi. Retrieved 27 October 2015.
  2. Lea, Richard (25 January 2013). "Jeet Thayil becomes first Indian winner of South Asian literature prize". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 January 2013.
  3. Suroor, Hasan (12 September 2012). "Jeet Thayil on Man Booker Prize shortlist". The Hindu.
  4. Staff writer (17 February 2013). "The Hindu Literary Prize goes to Jerry Pinto". The Hindu. Retrieved 18 February 2013.
  5. "Jeet Thayil - Literature". literature.britishcouncil.org.
  6. Ratnam, Dhamini (15 January 2012). "The history of Mumbai no one told you". Mid-Day. Retrieved 27 January 2012.
  7. "Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry". BigBridge.Org. Retrieved 9 June 2016.
  8. "Babur in London". The Opera Group. Archived from the original on 12 April 2012. Retrieved 27 January 2012.
  9. Majumdar, Anushree (13 July 2008). "Note Worthy". Indian Express. Retrieved 27 January 2012.
  10. Roy, Nilanjana (4 June 2006). "Finding the words again". The Hindu. Retrieved 27 January 2012.
  11. "Jeet Thayil among 24 selected for Sahitya Akademi Awards". The Hindu. 21 December 2012.
  12. Jeet Thayil; Vijay Nambisan (1992). Gemini. Viking. ISBN 0-670-84524-8.
  13. Brownjohn, Alan (3 June 2004). "Dom Moraes". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 January 2012.
  14. Mishra, Amit. "Collected Poems by Jeet Thayil – Book Review". Indian Book Critics. Indian Book Critics. Retrieved 16 April 2020.
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