Amitava Kumar

Writer. My Beloved Life (Knopf, 2024). Bylines: Granta, Harper's, New Yorker, NYT. Vassar prof. Guggenheim, Cullman Center Fellow.

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

Sometimes the book you write finds the right reader. Here is James Wood on my novel in the New Yorker magazine.
https://t.co/3m0NT0gwmH

[The Cullman Center @CullmanNYPL]

"Student mobilization produced a crack in the wall of power that Modi... has always sought to project."

Past @CullmanNYPL Fellow @amitavakumar breaks down India's youth-led protest movement for the @NewYorker:
https://t.co/qSfPHHZaXy

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

Neha on chai and coca-cola.
https://t.co/9sB6CKQrGp

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

My report from Delhi on the student protests:
https://t.co/rgyygunyjE

[The New Statesman @NewStatesman]

OPEN LETTER: Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist. Her books must be available to the public. Their withdrawal from sale, on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti terror legislation, is an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for granted in this country. We categorically reject censorship - whether direct or indirect - and urge the government to change course, amending the legislation which has led us to this point of repressive absurdity.

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

Salman Rushdie says that the young in India have given us something hopeful.

https://t.co/FP5wQ47yCR

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

What do the protests in Delhi mean for the rest of the world?
https://t.co/qrf0yabsjN

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

Postcards from a police state #india #delhi
https://t.co/wgbaYR25ho

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

Eliot Weinberger is coming to @Vassar.
https://t.co/k5wTXjvti1

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

<गोरखपुर में का बा?>
Can we imagine a time outside this time?
https://t.co/gkNUNpAjTx

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

Isaac Babel on writing and revising
https://t.co/2yUO52kuPr

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

Michael Ondaatje’s best-known book, the one that made him an international star, was “The English Patient,” published in 1992. It won the Booker Prize that year, and the film adaptation won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1997. It was his early work, however, that pushed past the formal conventions of expression—and, for Amitava Kumar, became the key to understanding the novel. Reading what came before “The English Patient,” Kumar “came to value ever more the brilliance, the daring of its narrative structure, its risky use of gaps and mystery and silence.” Kumar writes about what he learned from Ondaatje’s formal experimentation—about Ondaatje’s writing and his own: https://t.co/afzjozfcEN

[The Cullman Center @CullmanNYPL]

"Ondaatje found, in his writing, newness and, in language, a certain freedom."

Read past @CullmanNYPL Fellow @amitavakumar on the formal brilliance and daring of Michael Ondaatje:

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

Happy Independence Day, India!

Do we have toilets for everyone? Do we clean our toilets? Kiran Desai raises this question.

https://t.co/kU2i82plmw

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

A poet asks if the prime minister ought to work 18 hours.
https://t.co/UClr8Z8GI3

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

A poem: The Koel in History
https://t.co/Cd9eYhDVuC

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

Prompts for falling/failing in this world led by false prophets

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

🙏🏽���️

[Reading@2000 @the7424]

A mildly sad , vivacious work where the central character is a Historian working in patna.

@amitavakumar Boss kya behtareen cover hai ek waqt ko lagta hai aap hi baith kar padh rhe hai...

[Aleph Book Company @AlephBookCo]

We are proud to announce that Bena Sareen has won the 11th Oxford Bookstore Book Cover Prize for the exceptional cover of My Beloved Life by Amitava Kumar.

A huge congratulations to Bena Sareen for this recognition.

Spanning decades of change in India, Amitava Kumar’s story follows Jadunath Kunwar’s journey through love, friendship, loss, and history as he and his daughter, Jugnu, search for meaning in a rapidly evolving world.

@amitavakumar
@ShashiTharoor @oxfordbookstore

#BookCoverPrize #OxfordBookstoreBookCoverPrize #AlephBookCompany #AmitavaKumar #BenaSareen #BookDesign #CoverDesign

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

Congrats to Bena Sareen for this prize-winning cover for my book.
Thank you, @oxfordbookstore. Thank you, @AlephBookCo.

[Amitava Kumar @amitavakumar]

"The more I was hounded as an anti-national, the surer I was that India was the place I loved..." — Arundhati Roy
https://t.co/um9JnQ5spF