date
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@sa.ucsb.edu
Award-winning Indian-Canadian novelist Anita Rau Badami reads at UCSB Corwin Pavilion
Summary Facts:
- Anita Rau Badami
- An Afternoon with the Author
- Author of the recently released Tamarind Woman
- Commonwealth Writers Prize winner for The Hero’s Walk
- Born and raised in India and now living in Montreal
- Monday, May 13
- 4 pm / UCSB Corwin Pavilion
- Free event
- Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535
Anita Rau Badami, author of The Hero’s Walk, the winner of the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book in Canada and the Caribbean, will read on Monday, May 13 at 4 pm in UCSB Corwin Pavilion. This is a free event. Born and raised in India and currently living in Canada, Badami made her U.S. debut in 2000 with her second novel, The Hero’s Walk, a moving book about familial bonds, guilt, and the meaning of both home and homeland. Critically praised, the novel was hailed as “rich in sensuous detail, both sweet and bitter, and an almost cinematic sense of color and emotion” by Booklist. Following this success, Algonquin Books has just published Badami’s first novel, Tamarind Woman, in the United States. The book tells the poignant tale of a mother and daughter trying to bridge their very separate worlds. The Globe and Mail (Toronto) called the book “a tremendous achievement—a skillful and compassionate family saga that is personal, intimate, tender and revealing.”
Anita Rau Badami was born in the town of Rourkela in the eastern state of Orisson in India. Because her father worked as a mechanical engineer on the railroads, Ms. Badami’s family moved every two to three years. She grew up nurtured by stories told by her extended family in a multilingual atmosphere where English, Kannada and Hindi were all spoken. She first published an article at age seventeen as a way to earn money to buy books. It was the beginning of her freelance journalism career, writing for newspapers throughout India. She also worked as a copywriter for advertising agencies in Bombay, Bangalore and Madras while writing stories for children’s magazines (she originally thought she would write children’s books, not fiction for adults).
Badami moved to Canada in 1991 when her husband started graduate school in environmental science. She took creative writing courses and eventually wrote Tamarind Woman (titled Tamarind Mem in its initial Canadian publication) as her Master’s thesis. The book was published by Penguin and became a Canadian bestseller. Upon the book’s recent release in the United States, Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post wrote, “Tamarind Woman is a splendidly evocative picture of India after independence, of middle-class Indians moving into the void left by the departed British...and of the teeming life of the many towns in which [the characters] were set down. It is a book brimming over with smells, sounds and colors, putting the reader so firmly in place and time that you feel you are there. All in all, a lovely piece of work.”
This reading by Anita Rau Badami is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and the India Association of Santa Barbara. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, books by Anita Rau Badami will be available for purchase and signing.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.