In this Issue
To get a taste of what's in ALR35, expand this link to see our selection of free-to-view articles on the ALR34 Contents page. A good place to begin is From the Editors.
Then explore our interview with Anuradha Roy, who has just been announced winner of the 2018 TATA Book of the Year Award for Fiction.
There's lots of fiction, and we feature stories set in India, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, the US and North Korea. Read Zach Macdonald's A Happy Ending - a harrowing counterpoint to cheerful media reports about the Korean peninsula. Finally, sample some of the issue's poetry with Kunwar Narain and Katherine Wu - and there's more in Preview.
I was born at a strange hour. It was a Friday night. All was quiet in the village of Mihalpur and, I believe, within the small one-room hut, too. The threadbare curtains must have been closed. I am told that my mother never held me, and I suspect that she never looked into my face. A girl child. I can see her now, dark like me, her long hair matted with the sweat of labour, curled up in a corner on a hard, bare cot as tears leak down the sides of her face, limp with exhaustion and misery. That particular sequence of events is not such a mystery to me. I saw it happen many times, with other women. I was the silent witness.
As we go to press, Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived has just been announced winner of the 2018 TATA Book of the Year Award for fiction. One of India’s most successful and prominent writers, she is no stranger to literary acclaim. An Atlas of Impossible Longing and The Folded Earth won prizes and praise internationally, and in 2015 she was longlisted for the Booker with Sleeping on Jupiter, which went on to win the 2016 DSC South Asian Prize.
Recently, the Asia Literary Review’s Anurima Roy (no relation) caught up with Anuradha Roy to talk about her experiences as a publisher and writer, her sources of inspiration, her previous books, and about how she came to write All the Lives We Never Lived.