Two Indian novelists, Namita Gokhale and Anil Menon, and an academic and writer, Elleke Boehmer, discuss and explore contemporary Indian writing in English. They look at how ‘new’ India has been recreated and defined in an English language literature that is now reaching a global audience, and at how Indian fiction has moved beyond notions of ‘postcolonial’ writing to reflect increasingly confident and diverse cultures, innovative voices and creative forms.

Gokhale has written six novels, short stories and several works of non-fiction. Her first novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, was a satire on the Mumbai and Delhi elite and caused uproar because of its candid sexual humour. She is a founder-director of Jaipur Literature Festival. Menon is a leading Indian writer of ‘speculative fiction’. His debut young adult novel, The Beast with Nine Billion Feet, was shortlisted for the 2010 Vodafone Cross Word Book Award. Boehmer is professor of world literature in English at the University of Oxford.

The discussion is chaired by Dr Emma Dawson Varughese, author of Reading New India: post-millennial Indian fiction in English and Beyond The Postcolonial: World Englishes Literature, a comparative study of new English fiction from around the world.