In his lecture, “The Peripheral Imagination: Writing the Invisible India”, Aruni Kashyap will talk about his journey as a writer from India’s northeast – a region that rarely finds representation in India’s literary, cultural and political discourse. He will also briefly discuss the Assamese separatist movement: the backdrop against which his forthcoming novel unfolds.
The House With a Thousand Novels (Penguin India, 2013), is set in India’s northeastern state of Assam. Though Assam is famous around the world for its tea, few know the state has been the site of an armed secessionist conflict for the last three decades. His novel tells the story of a joint-family in rural Assam, during the “Secret killings of Assam” – a series of brutal extra-judicial killings of rebel sympathizers, allegedly sanctioned by the Indian government during the late 90s in order to weaken the separatist movement.
Aruni Kashyap is Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia, Athens, and 2024-2025 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow. Kashyap is the author of His Father’s Disease: Stories (Lubin & Kleyner, 2021) and the novel The House With a Thousand Stories (Penguin, 2013). He is also the editor of How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency: Fifteen Tales From Assam (HarperCollins India, 2020), and the translator of two novels from Assamese to English, published by Zubaan Books and Penguin Random House.
Kashyap is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Faculty Research Grants in the Humanities and Arts Program, the Arts Lab Faculty Fellowship, and the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh. His poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News (FutureCycle, 2021), was nominated for the 58th Georgia Author of the Year Awards 2022, a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, and the Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry. His translations have also been nominated for the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation 2023 and VOW Book Awards 2024.
Kashyap’s short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Catapult, Bitch Media, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from Northeast, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others.
