Anjana Basu

At the age of six, Anjana Basu was one of the winners of an all-UK essay competition organised by Cadbury’s and by 12, one of her first stories was serialised by The Times of India. A few years later, Kamala Das, then poetry editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, chose one of her poems for publication marking the beginning of a long and varied literary journey. To date, she has published 11 novels, one work of translation and three books of poetry. Her poetry collections include The Chess Players and Other Poems, Picture Poems and Word Seasons (Authorpress). Her poems have also appeared in a Penguin India anthology and internationally in several journals. One of her stories Smoke Gets In Your Eyes was broadcast by the BBC. Her first collection of magical realism, The Agency Raga, was published in 1994 followed by the novel Curses in Ivory in 2003. In 2004, she was awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland where she began work on her second novel, Black Tongue, published in 2007. Conspiracy of Aunts, the sequel to Curses in Ivory, was released in 2019. She began writing for children in 2010 with Chinku and the Wolfboy followed by Rhythms of Darkness and her acclaimed Jim Corbett series on big cat conservation. Most recently, she published Did Someone Say Woof?