Anjali Joseph Biography and latest books by Anjali Joseph

Anjali Joseph was born in Bombay in 1978. She studied English at the Trinity College, Cambridge, and then went about teaching English at the Sorbonne. She also recently wrote for the Times of India in Bombay and worked as a Commissioning Editor for ELLE (India). She pursued an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia with a distinction in 2008. Saraswati Park is her debut novel. Her father was a research scientist and taught at Warwick University.

She says that Amit Chaudhuri’s writing influenced her big time. She said in an interview, “It wasn’t a conscious decision but there are certainly things that Amit’s writing has sensitized me to. (For instance) the quieter moments in Indian life, the sound of a fan turning slowly, the way the light falls in a particular place. But there are quite a few other Indian writers I like. R.K. Narayan writes very beautiful about family life. The other one is Upamanyu Chatterjee, whose books I really admire.”

About her book - Saraswati Park

Along with the chaos, Bombay also accommodates pockets of calm. Mohan, a middle-aged letter writer - the last of a dying profession - sits under a banyan tree in Fort, furnishing missives for village migrants, lovers. But his true passion is collecting second-hand books; he\'s particularly attached to novels with marginal annotations. So when the pavement booksellers near Fort are evicted, Mohan’s life loses all its luster.

Anjali Joseph believes that when she began writing her first novel, Saraswati Park, she found herself wanting to write about Bombay, where she had grown up. Writing was both a way of recalling the bookish, quiet family life of my parents and grandparents, and reconciling or juxtaposing that existence with the brasher avtaar of the city where she lived and worked in her twenties.