Sahitya Akademi Award-winning writer Janice Pariat is emerging as one of the most distinctive literary voices from India
When we speak in February, Janice Pariat is in the middle of a busy schedule at the Ashoka University, where she teaches creative writing and the history of art. It’s only after the semester that she can dedicate all her time to writing. She is not sure what her next book will be, but says that it will, in some way, continue the conversations around climate change and the ecological crisis that she started with her latest book, Everything the Light Touches.
“It’s hard to not place a story or a set of characters in a context that does not accommodate that,” she says, adding that it has taken her a long time to emerge from the world of Everything the Light Touches, which took her 10 years to write.
The book is a work of fiction that spans across continents and centuries. It tells the story of four people whose journeys bring them close to nature. The book, which released around November 2022, was included in ‘The Best Books of 2022’ by The New Yorker. It went on to win the 2023 Sushila Devi Award and the AutHer Award for Best Fiction in 2023, and was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature.
Pariat also won the Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize 2023 in the fiction category.
Her book was picked by a panel of jury members, who chose it from a longlist of titles recommended by readers over the course of the year, says Lakshmi Sankar, co-founder of Atta Galatta.
(This story appears in the 22 March, 2024 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)