Vikram Seth
Encyclopedia
Vikram Seth is an India
n poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist.
and Prem Seth in Calcutta (now Kolkata
). His family lived in many cities including the Bata Shoe Company
town of Batanagar
, Danapur
near Patna
, and in London
.
His younger brother, Shantum, leads Buddhist meditational tours. His younger sister, Aradhana, is a film-maker married to an Austrian diplomat, and has worked on Deepa Mehta
's movies Earth
and Fire. (Compare the characters Haresh, Lata, Savita and two of the Chatterji siblings in A Suitable Boy: Seth has been candid in acknowledging that many of his fictional characters are drawn from life; he has said that only the dog Cuddles in A Suitable Boy has his real name — "Because he can't sue". Justice Leila Seth has said in her memoir On Balance that other characters in A Suitable Boy are composites but Haresh is a portrait of her husband Prem.)
Seth spent part of his youth in London but returned to his homeland in 1957. After receiving primary and commencing secondary education at the Doon School in Dehradun
in India, Seth returned to England to Tonbridge School
. From there, Seth studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford
, where he developed an interest in poetry and learned Chinese. After leaving Oxford, Seth moved to California to work on a graduate degree in economics at Stanford University
.
Having lived in London for many years, Seth now maintains residences near Salisbury
, England, where he is a participant in local literary and cultural events, having bought and renovated the house of the Anglican poet George Herbert
in 1996, and in Delhi, where he lives with his parents and keeps his extensive library and papers.
Seth self-identifies as bisexual. In 2006, he became a leader of the campaign against India's Section 377, a law against homosexuality.
, Seth detailed in an interview (in the year 2005) in the Australian magazine Good Weekend that he has studied several languages, including Welsh
, German
and, later, French
in addition to Mandarin, English
(which he describes as "my instrument" in answer to Indians who query his not writing in his native Hindi
), Urdu
(which he reads and writes in Nasta’liq script), and Hindi, which he reads and writes in the Dēvanāgarī script
. He plays the Indian flute and the cello and sings German lieder, especially Schubert.
recalled being interviewed by Seth for the position:
Seth later explained to Gordon that he had passed the interview not because of commercial considerations, but because unlike the others he was the only agent who seemed as interested in his poetry as in his other writing. Seth followed what he has described as "the ludicrous advance for that book" (£250,000 for A Suitable Boy) with £500,000 for An Equal Music and £1.4 million for Two Lives. He prepared an acrostic
poem for his address at Gordon's 2005 memorial service:
. It offers insight to Seth as a person, who is candid about the reality and effect of living abroad — though not in particular of being in diaspora — a theme which arises in his poetry but nowhere in his fiction:
, to whom he sent it for comment, referred to it scornfully among his intimates, though he offered Seth encouragement.
In 2009 Seth contributed four poems to Oxfam
which are used as introductions to each of the four collections of UK stories which form Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales
' book project.
) is a novel in verse about the lives of a number of young professionals in San Francisco. The novel is written entirely in Onegin stanza
s after the style Aleksandr Pushkin
's Eugene Onegin
. Seth had encountered Charles Johnston's 1977 translation of it in a Stanford second-hand bookstore and it changed the direction of his career, shifting his focus from academic to literary work. The likelihood of commercial success seemed highly doubtful — and the scepticism of friends as to the novel's viability is facetiously quoted within the novel; but the verse novel received wide acclaim (Gore Vidal
dubbed it "The Great California Novel") and achieved healthy sales. The novel contains a strong element of affectionate satire, as with his subsequent novel, A Suitable Boy.
"The Golden Gate, an opera in two acts with music by Conrad Cummings
and libretto from the novel-in-verse by Vikram Seth adapted by the composer" is currently (2010) in development by LivelyWorks and American Opera Projects and receives a staged workshop production at the Rose Studio at Lincoln Center in New York City in January 2010.
). Though initially conceived as a short piece detailing the domestic drama of an Indian mother's search for an appropriate husband for her marriageable Indian daughter against the background of the formative years of India
after independence, the novel grew and Seth was to labour over it for almost a decade. The 1474-page novel is a four-family saga set in post-independence, post-Partition
India, and alternatively satirically and earnestly examines issues of national politics in the period leading up to the first post-independence national election of 1952, inter-sectarian animosity, the status of lower caste peoples such as the jatav
, land reform and the eclipse of the feudal princes and landlords, academic affairs, inter- and intra-family relations and a range of further issues of importance to the characters. The Indian journalist and novelist Khushwant Singh
has said of the novel that, "I lived through that period and I couldn't find a flaw. It really is an authentic picture of Nehru's India." The novel was, despite its formidable length, a bestseller, and propelled Seth into the public spotlight.
Seth has confirmed (July 2009) that he is writing a contemporary novel including characters from A Suitable Boy, to be published in 2013. He describes A Suitable Girl as a "jump sequel", with Lata looking for a "suitable girl" for her grandson.
(1999
), set in contemporary Europe, focuses on the lives of classical musicians and their music.
Some readers and critics complained that Michael, the protagonist, was simply not a likeable (or unlikeable) enough character to sustain interest throughout a substantial novel and that the focus on the music for its own sake can be trying for the uninitiated. However, Paolo Isotta, one of Italy's most significant music critics, wrote in the influential newspaper Il Corriere della Sera of the Italian translation that no European writer had ever shown such a knowledge of European classical music, nor had any European novel before managed to convey the psychology, the technical abilities, even the human potentialities of those who practise music for a living
Seth credits his then-partner, the French violinist Philippe Honoré
, as inspiring him with the idea for An Equal Music
in an acrostic sonnet on Honoré's name in the epigraph:
Seth together with Philippe Honoré marketed a double CD of the music mentioned in An Equal Music, performed by Honoré.
house where English poet George Herbert
lived and died which also serves the illustration for the book cover. The libretti is written to accompany music by Alec Roth, and quite a few of the pieces were adjusted and rewritten to suit Roth's style. The venue for the libretti are churches, including Salisbury church.
The four parts are entitled 'Songs in Time of War', 'Shared Ground', 'The Traveller' and 'Seven Elements'. They are inspired from Chinese and Indian poetry and even George Herbert's house which Seth later bought.
They pieces are also accompanied by four pieces of calligraphy in Chinese, Hindi, English and Arabic by him.
, is a non-fiction family memoir written at the suggestion of his mother, and published in October 2005. It focuses on the lives of his great-uncle (Shanti Behari Seth) and German-Jewish great aunt (Henny Caro) who met in Berlin in the early 1930s while Shanti was a student there and with whom Seth stayed extensively on going to England at age 17 for school. As with From Heaven Lake, Two Lives contains much autobiography.
. He has continued to produce volumes of poetry at intervals alongside his publications in a range of other forms, including translations from Chinese poets.
A film of A Suitable Boy was slated to go into production in 2007, an earlier attempt at a television serialisation having been abandoned.
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist.
Early life
Vikram Seth was born on 20 June 1952 to LeilaLeila Seth
Justice Leila Seth was the first woman judge on the Delhi High Court and the first woman to become Chief Justice of a state High Court.-Background:Born in Lucknow in October 1930, she joined the Bar in 1959....
and Prem Seth in Calcutta (now Kolkata
Kolkata
Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...
). His family lived in many cities including the Bata Shoe Company
Bata Shoes
Bata Shoes is a large, family owned shoe company based in Bermuda but currently headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, operating 3 business units worldwide – Bata Metro Markets, Bata Emerging Markets and Bata Branded Business. It has a retail presence in over 50 countries and production...
town of Batanagar
Batanagar
Batanagar is a town in South 24 Parganas district in the state of West Bengal, India. It is a part of the area covered by Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority. It is one of the places named after the multinational shoe company Bata. There is a plant of the Bata company here...
, Danapur
Danapur
Danapur , sometimes known as Dinapur or Dinapore is a satellite town of Patna in Bihar state of India. It is located on the bank of the River Sone which merges with River Ganges at Digha a few kilometers from Danapur...
near Patna
Patna
Paṭnā , is the capital of the Indian state of Bihar and the second largest city in Eastern India . Patna is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the world...
, and in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
.
His younger brother, Shantum, leads Buddhist meditational tours. His younger sister, Aradhana, is a film-maker married to an Austrian diplomat, and has worked on Deepa Mehta
Deepa Mehta
Deepa Mehta, LLD is a Genie Award-winning Indian-born Canadian film director and screenwriter, most known for her Elements Trilogy, Fire , Earth , and Water , among which Earth was submitted by Indian government for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film...
's movies Earth
Earth (1998 film)
Earth is a 1998 film directed by Deepa Mehta. It is based upon Bapsi Sidhwa's novel, Cracking India, . Earth is the second part of Mehta's Elements trilogy...
and Fire. (Compare the characters Haresh, Lata, Savita and two of the Chatterji siblings in A Suitable Boy: Seth has been candid in acknowledging that many of his fictional characters are drawn from life; he has said that only the dog Cuddles in A Suitable Boy has his real name — "Because he can't sue". Justice Leila Seth has said in her memoir On Balance that other characters in A Suitable Boy are composites but Haresh is a portrait of her husband Prem.)
Seth spent part of his youth in London but returned to his homeland in 1957. After receiving primary and commencing secondary education at the Doon School in Dehradun
Dehradun
- Geography :The Dehradun district has various types of physical geography from Himalayan mountains to Plains. Raiwala is the lowest point at 315 meters above sea level, and the highest points are within the Tiuni hills, rising to 3700 m above sea level...
in India, Seth returned to England to Tonbridge School
Tonbridge School
Tonbridge School is a British boys' independent school for both boarding and day pupils in Tonbridge, Kent, founded in 1553 by Sir Andrew Judd . It is a member of the Eton Group, and has close links with the Worshipful Company of Skinners, one of the oldest London livery companies...
. From there, Seth studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Corpus Christi College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom...
, where he developed an interest in poetry and learned Chinese. After leaving Oxford, Seth moved to California to work on a graduate degree in economics at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
.
Having lived in London for many years, Seth now maintains residences near Salisbury
Salisbury
Salisbury is a cathedral city in Wiltshire, England and the only city in the county. It is the second largest settlement in the county...
, England, where he is a participant in local literary and cultural events, having bought and renovated the house of the Anglican poet George Herbert
George Herbert
George Herbert was a Welsh born English poet, orator and Anglican priest.Being born into an artistic and wealthy family, he received a good education that led to his holding prominent positions at Cambridge University and Parliament. As a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Herbert excelled in...
in 1996, and in Delhi, where he lives with his parents and keeps his extensive library and papers.
Seth self-identifies as bisexual. In 2006, he became a leader of the campaign against India's Section 377, a law against homosexuality.
Work Themes
A polyglotMultilingualism
Multilingualism is the act of using, or promoting the use of, multiple languages, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. Multilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of...
, Seth detailed in an interview (in the year 2005) in the Australian magazine Good Weekend that he has studied several languages, including Welsh
Welsh language
Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
and, later, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
in addition to Mandarin, English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
(which he describes as "my instrument" in answer to Indians who query his not writing in his native Hindi
Hindi
Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
), Urdu
Urdu
Urdu is a register of the Hindustani language that is identified with Muslims in South Asia. It belongs to the Indo-European family. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also widely spoken in some regions of India, where it is one of the 22 scheduled languages and an...
(which he reads and writes in Nasta’liq script), and Hindi, which he reads and writes in the Dēvanāgarī script
Devanagari
Devanagari |deva]]" and "nāgarī" ), also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...
. He plays the Indian flute and the cello and sings German lieder, especially Schubert.
Business acumen
Seth's former literary agent Giles GordonGiles Gordon
Giles Alexander Esmé Gordon was a Scottish literary agent and writer, based for most of his career in London....
recalled being interviewed by Seth for the position:
Vikram sat at one end of a long table and he began to grill us. It was absolutely incredible. He wanted to know our literary tastes, our views on poetry, our views on plays, which novelists we liked.
Seth later explained to Gordon that he had passed the interview not because of commercial considerations, but because unlike the others he was the only agent who seemed as interested in his poetry as in his other writing. Seth followed what he has described as "the ludicrous advance for that book" (£250,000 for A Suitable Boy) with £500,000 for An Equal Music and £1.4 million for Two Lives. He prepared an acrostic
Acrostic
An acrostic is a poem or other form of writing in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out a word or a message. As a form of constrained writing, an acrostic can be used as a mnemonic device to aid memory retrieval. A famous...
poem for his address at Gordon's 2005 memorial service:
- Gone though you have, I heard your voice today.
- I tried to make out what the words might mean,
- Like something seen half-clearly on a screen:
- Each savoured reference, each laughing bark,
- Sage comment, bad pun, indiscreet remark.
- Gone since you have, grief too in time will go,
- Or share space with old joy; it must be so.
- Rest then in peace, but spare us some elation.
- Death cannot put down every conversation.
- Over and out, as you once used to say?
- Not on your life. You're on this line to stay.
Travel writing: From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
His travel book From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983) was his first popular success and won the Thomas Cook Travel Book AwardThomas Cook Travel Book Award
The Thomas Cook Travel Book Award originated as an initiative of Thomas Cook AG in 1980, with the aim of encouraging and rewarding the art of literary travel writing. The awards stopped in 2005...
. It offers insight to Seth as a person, who is candid about the reality and effect of living abroad — though not in particular of being in diaspora — a theme which arises in his poetry but nowhere in his fiction:
Increasingly of late, and particularly when I drink, I find my thoughts drawn into the past rather than impelled into the future. I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of my earlier student days in England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias. (p.35)
Poetry
Seth has published five volumes of poetry. His first, Mappings (1980), was originally privately published; it attracted little attention and indeed Philip LarkinPhilip Larkin
Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...
, to whom he sent it for comment, referred to it scornfully among his intimates, though he offered Seth encouragement.
In 2009 Seth contributed four poems to Oxfam
Oxfam
Oxfam is an international confederation of 15 organizations working in 98 countries worldwide to find lasting solutions to poverty and related injustice around the world. In all Oxfam’s actions, the ultimate goal is to enable people to exercise their rights and manage their own lives...
which are used as introductions to each of the four collections of UK stories which form Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales
Ox-Tales
Ox-Tales refers to four anthologies of short stories written by 38 of the UK's best known authors. All the authors donated their stories to Oxfam...
' book project.
Hybrid: The "novel in verse": The Golden Gate
The first of his novels, The Golden Gate (19861986 in literature
The year 1986 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Michael Grade. Controller of BBC One, axes plans to televise Ian Curteis's The Falklands Play.-New books:*Kingsley Amis - The Old Devils...
) is a novel in verse about the lives of a number of young professionals in San Francisco. The novel is written entirely in Onegin stanza
Onegin stanza
Onegin stanza refers to the verse form invented by Alexander Pushkin for his interpersonal epic Eugene Onegin...
s after the style Aleksandr Pushkin
Aleksandr Pushkin
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature....
's Eugene Onegin
Eugene Onegin
Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse written by Alexander Pushkin.It is a classic of Russian literature, and its eponymous protagonist has served as the model for a number of Russian literary heroes . It was published in serial form between 1825 and 1832...
. Seth had encountered Charles Johnston's 1977 translation of it in a Stanford second-hand bookstore and it changed the direction of his career, shifting his focus from academic to literary work. The likelihood of commercial success seemed highly doubtful — and the scepticism of friends as to the novel's viability is facetiously quoted within the novel; but the verse novel received wide acclaim (Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
dubbed it "The Great California Novel") and achieved healthy sales. The novel contains a strong element of affectionate satire, as with his subsequent novel, A Suitable Boy.
"The Golden Gate, an opera in two acts with music by Conrad Cummings
Conrad Cummings
Conrad Cummings is an American composer of contemporary classical music. His compositions include works for orchestra, as well as operatic and chamber works. Many of his works are composed in a minimalist style reminiscent of that of Philip Glass.Cummings was born in San Francisco, California,...
and libretto from the novel-in-verse by Vikram Seth adapted by the composer" is currently (2010) in development by LivelyWorks and American Opera Projects and receives a staged workshop production at the Rose Studio at Lincoln Center in New York City in January 2010.
A Suitable Boy
After the success of The Golden Gate, Seth took up residence in his parents' house back in Delhi to work on his second novel, A Suitable Boy (19931993 in literature
The year 1993 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Professor Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time, becomes the longest running book on the bestseller list of The Sunday Times....
). Though initially conceived as a short piece detailing the domestic drama of an Indian mother's search for an appropriate husband for her marriageable Indian daughter against the background of the formative years of India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
after independence, the novel grew and Seth was to labour over it for almost a decade. The 1474-page novel is a four-family saga set in post-independence, post-Partition
Partition of India
The Partition of India was the partition of British India on the basis of religious demographics that led to the creation of the sovereign states of the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India on 14 and 15...
India, and alternatively satirically and earnestly examines issues of national politics in the period leading up to the first post-independence national election of 1952, inter-sectarian animosity, the status of lower caste peoples such as the jatav
Jatav
Jatav , also called Jatia, Jatba in the Jammu region Jatoi, is the largest tribe of the Chamar caste in India.-Origin and etymology:...
, land reform and the eclipse of the feudal princes and landlords, academic affairs, inter- and intra-family relations and a range of further issues of importance to the characters. The Indian journalist and novelist Khushwant Singh
Khushwant Singh
Khushwant Singh is a prominent Indian novelist and journalist. Singh's weekly column, "With Malice towards One and All", carried by several Indian newspapers, is among the most widely-read columns in the country....
has said of the novel that, "I lived through that period and I couldn't find a flaw. It really is an authentic picture of Nehru's India." The novel was, despite its formidable length, a bestseller, and propelled Seth into the public spotlight.
Seth has confirmed (July 2009) that he is writing a contemporary novel including characters from A Suitable Boy, to be published in 2013. He describes A Suitable Girl as a "jump sequel", with Lata looking for a "suitable girl" for her grandson.
An Equal Music
Seth's third novel, An Equal MusicAn Equal Music
-Plot:The plot concerns Michael, a professional violinist, who never forgot his love for Julia, a pianist he met as a student in Vienna. They meet again after a decade, and conduct a secret affair, though she is married and has one child...
(1999
1999 in literature
The year 1999 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*June 19 - Stephen King is hit by a Dodge van while taking a walk. He spends the next three weeks hospitalized...
), set in contemporary Europe, focuses on the lives of classical musicians and their music.
Some readers and critics complained that Michael, the protagonist, was simply not a likeable (or unlikeable) enough character to sustain interest throughout a substantial novel and that the focus on the music for its own sake can be trying for the uninitiated. However, Paolo Isotta, one of Italy's most significant music critics, wrote in the influential newspaper Il Corriere della Sera of the Italian translation that no European writer had ever shown such a knowledge of European classical music, nor had any European novel before managed to convey the psychology, the technical abilities, even the human potentialities of those who practise music for a living
Seth credits his then-partner, the French violinist Philippe Honoré
Philippe Honoré
Philippe Honoré is a French-born violinist who has been a regular recitalist in both France and the United Kingdom. He has performed widely in broadcast recitals on French radio and television....
, as inspiring him with the idea for An Equal Music
An Equal Music
-Plot:The plot concerns Michael, a professional violinist, who never forgot his love for Julia, a pianist he met as a student in Vienna. They meet again after a decade, and conduct a secret affair, though she is married and has one child...
in an acrostic sonnet on Honoré's name in the epigraph:
- Perhaps this could have stayed unstated.
- Had our words turned to other things
- In the grey park, the rain abated,
- Life would have quickened other strings.
- I list your gifts in this creation:
- Pen, paper, ink and inspiration,
- Peace to the heart with touch or word,
- Ease to the soul with note and chord.
- How did that walk, those winter hours,
- Occasion this? No lightning came;
- Nor did I sense, when touched by flame,
- Our story lit with borrowed powers -
- Rather, by what our spirits burned,
- Embered in words, to us returned.
Seth together with Philippe Honoré marketed a double CD of the music mentioned in An Equal Music, performed by Honoré.
The Rivered Earth
The Rivered Earth, released in late 2011, consists of four libretti taking inspiration from the SalisburySalisbury
Salisbury is a cathedral city in Wiltshire, England and the only city in the county. It is the second largest settlement in the county...
house where English poet George Herbert
George Herbert
George Herbert was a Welsh born English poet, orator and Anglican priest.Being born into an artistic and wealthy family, he received a good education that led to his holding prominent positions at Cambridge University and Parliament. As a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Herbert excelled in...
lived and died which also serves the illustration for the book cover. The libretti is written to accompany music by Alec Roth, and quite a few of the pieces were adjusted and rewritten to suit Roth's style. The venue for the libretti are churches, including Salisbury church.
The four parts are entitled 'Songs in Time of War', 'Shared Ground', 'The Traveller' and 'Seven Elements'. They are inspired from Chinese and Indian poetry and even George Herbert's house which Seth later bought.
They pieces are also accompanied by four pieces of calligraphy in Chinese, Hindi, English and Arabic by him.
Biography/Memoir: Two Lives
Two LivesTwo Lives
Vikram Seth’s second non-fiction work, Two Lives, is the story of a century and of a love affair across an ethnic divide. As the name suggests, it is a story of two extraordinary lives, that of his great uncle, Shanti Behari Seth, and of his German Jewish great aunt, Hennerle Gerda Caro.Two Lives...
, is a non-fiction family memoir written at the suggestion of his mother, and published in October 2005. It focuses on the lives of his great-uncle (Shanti Behari Seth) and German-Jewish great aunt (Henny Caro) who met in Berlin in the early 1930s while Shanti was a student there and with whom Seth stayed extensively on going to England at age 17 for school. As with From Heaven Lake, Two Lives contains much autobiography.
Range
Seth's range is demonstrated by the historical accuracy of A Suitable Boy, with the nuanced cultivated-Indian English of the narrative voice and the entirely in-character voices of the principals of the story; the correspondingly accurate depiction of northern California yuppies of the 1980s in The Golden Gate; and his portrait of the world of western classical musicians in An Equal MusicAn Equal Music
-Plot:The plot concerns Michael, a professional violinist, who never forgot his love for Julia, a pianist he met as a student in Vienna. They meet again after a decade, and conduct a secret affair, though she is married and has one child...
. He has continued to produce volumes of poetry at intervals alongside his publications in a range of other forms, including translations from Chinese poets.
A film of A Suitable Boy was slated to go into production in 2007, an earlier attempt at a television serialisation having been abandoned.
Prizes and awards
- 1983 - Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
- 1985 - Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) The Humble Administrator's Garden
- 1993 - Irish Times International Fiction Prize (shortlist) A Suitable Boy
- 1994 - Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) A Suitable Boy
- 1994 - WH Smith Literary AwardWH Smith Literary AwardThe WH Smith Literary Award was an award founded in 1959 by British high street retailer W H Smith. Its founding aim was stated to be to "encourage and bring international esteem to authors of the British Commonwealth"; originally open to all residents of the UK, the Commonwealth and the Republic...
A Suitable Boy - 1999 - Crossword Book AwardVodafone Crossword Book AwardVodafone Crossword Book Award is an Indian book award sponsored by Vodafone and Crossword Bookstores. It is India's biggest private sector award. The Award was instituted in 1998 with the intention of competing with The Booker Prize, Commonwealth Writers' Prize or The Pulitzer Prize.The award...
"An Equal Music" - 2001 - EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award) for Best Book/Novel An Equal Music
- 2005 - Pravasi Bharatiya SammanPravasi Bharatiya SammanThe Pravasi Bharatiya Samman is an award constituted by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, Government of India in conjunction with the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas , to honor exceptional and meritorious contribution in their chosen field/profession...
- 2007 - Padma ShriPadma ShriPadma Shri is the fourth highest civilian award in the Republic of India, after the Bharat Ratna, the Padma Vibhushan and the Padma Bhushan...
in Literature & Education