Paging Pakistan: outtakes from a story about Pakistani writing in English,

In other words, while it’s a truism that strife-ridden times and places produce high-quality art (another Pakistani writer, Azhar Abidi, likens the growth of PWE to developments in Latin American literature, where authors like Fuentes and Llosa wrote about the experience of living under dictatorships), it’s also true that literature is among the first casualties when international relations break down. “After all, far more people get their views from news reports than from novels,” says Shamsie wryly. For now, the best that these writers can do is to go on quietly plying their trade: as Aamer Hussain poetically puts it, “Each of us has his or her own unique way of bearing witness to our times, however small our canvas, whether we use sepia or colour, bold strokes or muted colours.” The best that we readers can do is to engage with their books and use them to supplement what we read in newspapers and hear in speeches made by posturing politicians. Chronicles of our times Jai Arjun Singh

Slightly atypical post, this, probably best seen as a storehouse. I recently did this story for Business Standard Weekend about the interesting developments in Pakistani Writing in English (PWE) – or Pakistani Anglophone Writing (PAW) if you prefer. But even the generous word-length (1600 words) wasn’t enough to fit in all the responses that came in from the writers I had contacted. So here, by way of supplementing the article, are the full texts of their replies. Am using the questions I asked as anchoring devices and putting the authors’ responses beneath them – apologies if this makes it look like a round-table discussion, which it wasn’t!
Paging Pakistan: outtakes from a story about Pakistani writing in English

Fiction's Future: Words, Sentences, Quotes


Poetry has lost the symbolic power needed to address shared values, writes Francesco Stella, having ceded this to other media such as pop music. On "the Semicerchio debate" and the search for a new poetic canon. Francesco Stella

In terms of actual, quantitative remuneration in the world, an MFA gets you diddlysquat. It doesn’t even really open doors. Good work does that. Connections do that. Yes, an MFA can help you develop good work and connections, but what you do with them next is up to you and without those things, an MFA is just three little old meaningless letters. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be harsh. Well, OK, maybe I do mean to be a bit harsh because no one likes a writer with an over-developed sense of entitlement. Writing Advice: The World Doesn’t Give a Rat’s Ass About Your MFA


TS Eliot rejected Bloomsbury group's 'cursed fund' to work in bank By Alison Flood on Books
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In her latest novel, the Canadian writer describes an Earth ravaged by an ecological disaster. She's crossing the Atlantic now on the Queen Mary 2 for what's billed as the greenest book tour ever – with songs thrown in Margaret Atwood is currently at sea. She has set sail for the first leg of a book tour to promote her novel The Year of the Flood, an everyday tale of pestilence and pandemic, set in the near future (and required campfire reading for the eco-warriors in south-east London).