Posts From Author: the twice-born

Seriously Questioning…Aatish Taseer

Aatish Taseer is the author of the memoir Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands and three acclaimed novels: The Way Things Were, a finalist for the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize; The Temple-Goers, which was short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award; and Noon; and, a new work of nonfiction, The Twice-Born: Life and Death on the Ganges. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a contributing writer for The International New York Times and lives in New Delhi and New York. On March 26, he will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, Seeing Blindly, alongside Patrick Radden Keefe, Elizabeth Keenan, Safiya Sinclair, and Greg Wands. We spoke to Aatish ahead of the show. What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? We went, my mother and I, to a colony market in South Delhi, and bought Coleridge’s poems. I must have been five, or six. In weak fluctuating light, she read me In Xanadu. It was the purest connection I have ever known with sound as a semantic force in its own right. For years, I knew all the words, and never thought it even slightly important to know what they meant. What is […]
Read More