Indian Author Anuradha Roy Shortlisted For International Dublin Literary Awards 2020

Noted Indian writer Anuradha Roy has been shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Awards 2020 for her book All The Lives We Never Lived. There a total of eight women authors on the shortlist, including Roy. The International Dublin Literary Awards is sponsored by the Dublin City Council. Each year it is presented for novels either written in or translated to English. Notably, it is also one of the richest literary awards in the world, worth 100,000 Euros. Some of the other noted authors shortlisted this year are Anna Burns, Tayari Jones and Olga Tokarczuk.

All The Lives We Never Lived has been selected from a list of 156 novels. These novels were submitted by library systems in 119 cities in 40 countries. The book happens to be Anuradha Roy’s fourth novel,  was the winner of the Tata Literature Live Book of the Year Award in 2018. It was also shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the JCB Prize, The Hindu Literary Prize in the same year and for the Walter Scott Prize in 2019.

Key Takeaways:

• Noted writer Anuradha Roy has been shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Awards 2020 for her book All The Lives We Never Lived.
• The book has been selected from a list of 156 novels submitted by library systems in 119 cities in 40 countries.
• There are eight women authors in the shortlist of ten for the Awards, including Roy.

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About Anuradha Roy:

Anuradha Roy was born in 1967 in Kolkata. She studied English Literature from Presidency College in the city and has been affiliated to the University of Calcutta and University of Cambridge. Currently, she lives in Ranikhet and is the Co-founder of Permanent Black, a publishing house.  Roy is also the author of critically acclaimed books such as An Atlas of Impossible Longing, Sleeping on the Jupiter, and The Folded Sun. In the year 2016, she won the DSC South Asian Literature prize for her book Sleeping on Jupiter. Roy was also shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2015 for the same book.

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In an exclusive interview with SheThePeople.TV, Roy opened about her style of writing, saying, "There’s so much that is hard to explain about your own writing. As with any other characters, though, through the process of writing, I get closer and closer to these fictional people who sometimes start as nothing more than a gesture or a habit." Read the full interview here.

About the book:

All The Lives We Never Lived explores the meaning and effects of childhood, motherhood, family, ambition and nationalism through multiple perspectives and experiences of an Indian female artist, a German artist and adventurer, an Indian nationalist, an English dancer and a small Indian boy from the town of Muntazir.

Roy said that she wanted to write the story of a boy who lived such an intense life of the imagination that he actually entered and inhabited certain paintings. "The magical thing about the writing of it was how a whole world slowly started taking shape as I mulled over which pictures the boy would look at. At a museum in Bali, looking at the paintings of Walter Spies, I discovered he died on 19th January, the very day my beloved old dog had recently died. I know this sounds whimsical, but it felt as if my life, the novel and one real-life character were connected. Slowly these ripples spread wider – as I discovered Tagore had met Spies; that Beryl de Zoete, who wrote a book with Spies, had come to India to write on dance."

Arunima Sharma is an intern at SheThePeople.TV.