Neel Mukherjee
(India, 1970) grew up and was educated in Calcutta, Oxford and Cambridge. His book The Lives of Others, about life in Calcutta, was nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize and highly praised in the international press. The novel, which will be released in Dutch translation during the festival, portrays a bourgeois Calcutta family. When one of the sons joins a radical political group, its already complicated relationships come into sharp focus. The ruling hierarchy of the family, three generations of which live under one roof, reflects the complex Indian caste sytem. Mukherjee's first novel, A Life Apart, is about an Indian man who moves from Calcutta to London to build a new life. Mukherjee is a critic for The Times and The Sunday Telegraph, and has written for The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, The New York Times and other papers.
(2015)Share this page
Archive available for: Neel Mukherjee
-
Seven Deadly Sins
Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger and sloth. The seven deadly sins are inseparable from literature, film and visual art. The festival asked seven authors to each choose one and write a fresh text about it. Tonight you'll hear sinful stories from home and abroad, with accompanying music by Dick van der Harst. A superb literary-musical programme to enjoy with abandon. José Eduardo Agualusa, Slavenka Drakulić, Mira Feticu, Petina Gappah, Daan Heerma van Voss, Andrej Kurkov and Neel Mukherjee read in their own language, with simultaneous translations projected in English and Dutch.
-
The Limits of Empathy
Indo-British writer Neel Mukherjee made the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize with his ambitious novel The Lives of Others, a tale of limited empathy and missing bonds within a large family. The Dutch translation will be presented during the festival. Connie Palmen wrote Jij zegt het (Whatever You Say), a bestseller about the poet Ted Hughes, whose wife, poetess Sylvia Plath, committed suicide after the limits of their love had been reached. Power plays a major role in both of these families. Does evil lurk in every relationship? Anna Luyten gets the discussion started.
-
Past Evils, Present Problems. Winternachten lecture by Susan Neiman
German-American philosopher Susan Neiman delivers this year's Winternachten Lecture. She zooms in on the way nations deal with their problematic pasts. Do Germans set a good example with their "Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung"? What about the Americans' handling of Hiroshima, or slavery? And the Europeans, with their colonial histories? Neiman finds links between processing the past and the attitude of European states toward current challenges, such as the refugee crisis. After the lecture, Sheila Sitalsing moderates a debate on this subject between Neiman, Geert Mak and Neel Mukherjee. In English
Neel Mukherjee replaces Tariq Ali, who had to cancel his appearance for personal reasons.