Lecture by Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, essayist, composer, and Fellow with the Institute for Ideas and Imagination

This talk is a reading from a work-in-progress about music. It describes a life lived as an only child in high-rise buildings in 1970s Bombay, and the unexpected incursion, into this life, of the North Indian classical music tradition. This incursion engenders an education in more than music; it prompts a rethinking, and leads to the beginnings of a thought-process to do with how both artists and cultural traditions relate to the "world,” to the matter of representing reality and living in it.

This lecture is part of the "Wednesdays at the Institute" lecture series organized by the Institute for Ideas & Imagination.

Amit Chaudhuri– India / United Kingdom - University of East Anglia

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, a composer in experimental music, and an Indian classical musician. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of seven novels, the latest of which, Friend of My Youth, is out next month in the US. He has two collections of poetry; the second, Sweet Shop, came out in the UK this month. He has written a critical study of D H Lawrence’s poetry, and two previous collections of essays on literature and culture. His third book of essays, The Origins of Dislike, was recently published. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the L.A. Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award, and the inaugural Infosys Prize in the humanities for outstanding contribution to literary studies.