Neelum Saran Gour

Neelum Saran Gour (born 12 October 1955) is an Indian English writer of fiction that depicts North India's small towns and their cultural histories. She is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories and one work of literary non-fiction. She has edited a pictorial volume on the history and culture of the city of Allahabad, where she lives and works, and has also translated one of her early novels into Hindi.

Early life and education

Born in Allahabad, Neelum Saran Gour is the child of a Bengali mother and a Hindiphone father and was exposed to an array of languages and cultural influences in her childhood. Educated in St. Mary's Convent Inter College, a school run by Roman Catholic nuns, she went on to study History, Philosophy and English Literature at the University of Allahabad in the early nineteen seventies. In 1977, she was appointed Lecturer in English in the Department of English at the Allahabad University and now holds the position of Professor in her subject, English Literature.

Career

Neelum Saran Gour's first writings were magazine stories published in Indian literary magazines. Managing Director of Penguin India, David Davidar the solicited her for a volume of short stories. Her debut collection ''Grey Pigeon and Other Stories'' was released by Penguin India in 1993. She then won a Writers’ Fellowship in Britain from the Charles Wallace India Trust. Her next book, a novel, was titled ''Speaking of '62'' and was published by Penguin in 1995. This was followed in 1997 by ''Winter Companions And Other Stories''.

In 2002 appeared ''Virtual Realities'' and in 2005 two novels were published, ''Sikandar Chowk Park'' by Penguin, and ''Messres Dickens, Doyle and Wodehouse Pvt. Ltd''. by Halcyon Books. Her work was covered by ''Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-colonial Literatures,'' edited by Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly, ''The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Women’s Writing'', edited by Lorna Sage, Germaine Greer and Elaine Showalter, ''Companion to Indian Fiction In English'', edited by Pier Paolo Piciucco, and ''Indian English Literature 1980 -2000'' by M.K.Naik and Shyamala Narayan. Recent critical writings on her work are included in ''Emerging South Asian Writers'', Edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Deborah Fillerup Weagel and in ''Contemporary Fiction: An Anthology of Female Writers'', edited by Vandana Pathak, Urmila Dabir and Shubha Mishra.

In 2009, she published the pictorial volume ''Allahabad Where The Rivers Meet'', edited by Gour and published by Marg Publications. In 2010, Penguin–Yatra published a Hindi translation of Gour's early novel ''Speaking of 62'', titled ''62 Ki Baatein''. 2011 saw the launch of ''Song Without End And Other Stories'' by Penguin. A work of non-fiction followed in 2015, about the literary history of the Allahabad University, ''Three Rivers And A Tree – The Story Of Allahabad University'', published by Rupa Publications. This was followed, in the same year, by ''Allahabad Aria'', also published by Rupa Publications and ''Invisible Ink'', published in late 2015 by HarperCollins. Her latest novel is ''Requiem In Raga Janki'', published in June 2018 by Penguin Viking

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