Jeet Thayil (born 1959) is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He is the author of several poetry collections, including ''These Errors Are Correct'' (2008), which won the
Sahitya Akademi Award
The Sahitya Akademi Award is a literary honour in India, which the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, annually confers on writers of the most outstanding books of literary merit published in any of the 22 languages of the ...
. His first novel, '' Narcopolis,'' (2012), won the
DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature is an international literary prize awarded annually to writers of any ethnicity or nationality writing about South AsiaNote: South Asia for the purposes of the prize is defined as India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka ...
Kerala
Kerala ( ; ) is a state on the Malabar Coast of India. It was formed on 1 November 1956, following the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, by combining Malayalam-speaking regions of the erstwhile regions of Cochin, Malabar, South ...
, India. His father is writer and editor Thayil Jacob Sony George, and the family moved with his work. Thayil was raised in
Mumbai
Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — List of renamed Indian cities and states#Maharashtra, the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' fin ...
until age 8, then moved to
Hong Kong
Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta i ...
, and returned to Mumbai at age 18 where he graduated from Wilson College. He later completed an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Until age 40, Thayil lived in Mumbai and Bengaluru, and worked as a journalist in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hong Kong, and New York.
In 2006, he told the''
The Hindu
''The Hindu'' is an Indian English-language daily newspaper owned by The Hindu Group, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. It began as a weekly in 1878 and became a daily in 1889. It is one of the Indian newspapers of record and the secon ...
'' that he had been an alcoholic and an addict for almost two decades. He began using drugs after he returned to India at age 18. In 2013, he told '' Gulf News'' that he successfully quit at age 42.
As a songwriter and guitarist, he is one half of the contemporary music project Sridhar/Thayil (Mumbai, New Delhi).
Writing career
His first novel, '' Narcopolis'' (2012), is set mostly in Bombay in the 1970s and '80s, and sets out to tell the city's secret history, when opium gave way to new cheap heroin. Thayil has said he wrote the novel: "to create a kind of memorial, to inscribe certain names in stone. As one of the characters n ''Narcopolis''says, it is only by repeating the names of the dead that we honour them. I wanted to honour the people I knew in the opium dens, the marginalised, the addicted and deranged, people who are routinely called the lowest of the low; and I wanted to make some record of a world that no longer exists, except within the pages of a book."
His other novels include ''The Book of Chocolate Saints'' (2017), ''Low'' (2020), and ''Names of the Women'' (2021). Thayil spent five years writing an 800-page draft of ''Narcopolis'', and then split the draft into the 300-page ''Narcopolis'' and his later novels ''The Book of Chocolate Saints'' and ''Low''.
His poetry collections include ''Gemini'' (1992), ''Apocalypso'' (1997), ''English'' (2004), ''These Errors Are Correct'' (2008), and ''Collected Poems'' (2015). In 2016, he was the Arts Queensland Poet-In-Residence.
Thayil is the editor of the ''Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets'' ( Bloodaxe, UK, 2008), ''60 Indian Poets'' (Penguin India, 2008) and a collection of essays, ''Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora'' (
Routledge
Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law ...
, 2006). His poetry is included in ''Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry'' (United States, 2015).
He is the author of the libretto for the opera ''Babur in London'', commissioned by the UK-based Opera Group with music by the Zürich-based British composer
Edward Rushton
Edward Rushton (1756–1814) was a British poet, writer and bookseller from Liverpool, England. He worked as a sailor aboard a slave ship as a young man, and became an abolitionist as a result. After losing his own vision, he opened a school fo ...
. The world premiere of ''Babur'' took place in Switzerland in 2012, followed by tours to the United Kingdom (performed at theatres in London and Oxford) and India. At the work's core is an exploration about the complexities of faith and multiculturalism in modern-day Britain. Its action hinges on an imagined encounter between a group of religious fundamentalists and the ghost of Babur, who challenges their plans for a suicide strike.
DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature is an international literary prize awarded annually to writers of any ethnicity or nationality writing about South AsiaNote: South Asia for the purposes of the prize is defined as India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka ...
, worth $50,000, for the novel ''Narcopolis''.
Style
The Indian poet
Dom Moraes
Dominic Francis Moraes (19 July 1938 – 2 June 2004) was an Indian writer and poet who published nearly 30 books in English. He is widely seen as a foundational figure in Indian English literature. His poems are a meaningful and substantial c ...
, in his introduction to Thayil's first book of poems (with poet Vijay Nambisan), ''Gemini'', said that Thayil did not trouble his mind with the concerns of many Indian poets, their Indianness, that he did not make statements that were irrelevant to his work, that his concerns were mainly personal. Thayil, Moraes said, "works his feelings out with care, through colourations of mood rather than through explicit statements."
About ''Narcopolis'', Thayil said, "I've always been suspicious of the novel that paints India in soft focus, a place of loved children and loving elders, of monsoons and mangoes and spices. To equal Bombay as a subject you would have to go much further than the merely nostalgic will allow. The grotesque may be a more accurate means of carrying out such an enterprise."
Thayil, writes a reviewer for Indian Book Critics, is good when he writes without personal exertions (review for Collected Poems).
Bibliography
Poetry
*''Collected Poems'',
Aleph Book Company
Aleph Book Company is an Indian publishing company. It was founded in May 2011 by David Davidar, a novelist, publisher and former president of Penguin Books Canada, in association with R. K. Mehra and Kapish Mehra of Rupa Publications. The he ...
, New Delhi, 2015.
*''These Errors Are Correct'', Tranquebar Books (EastWest and Westland), Delhi, 2008.
*''English'',
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.Penguin-Viking, New Delhi, 1992. (two-poet volume ),
*''The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets'', Bloodaxe UK, 2008
*''60 Indian Poets'',
Penguin India
Penguins (order Sphenisciformes , family Spheniscidae ) are a group of aquatic flightless birds. They live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere: only one species, the Galápagos penguin, is found north of the Equator. Highly adapt ...
, 2008
*''Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora'',
Routledge
Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law ...
, 2006
*''Give the Sea Change and It Shall Change'': 56 Indian Poets, Fulcrum, 2005
*''Vox2: Seven Stories'', Sterling Newspapers, India, 1997