One of the highlights at this year's Emirates Airline Festival of Literature is the presence of established British-Indian author Amit Chaudhuri, who, besides reading along with other authors, will be performing with his band.
The novelist, who is also a trained Indian classical singer, told Emirates Business he was looking forward to it. "I will be performing with my group, The Amit Chaudhuri Band. Music is another side of me," he said.
Chaudhuri's visit will be his first to the emirate. "I am excited to be visiting Dubai," he said on the phone from India. "It will be amazing to see what it is like. I want to find out about its history."
The writer and academic, who divides his time between Kolkata and Cambridgeshire – where he teaches at the University of East Anglia – will read with authors Alexander McCall Smith, as well as attend a panel discussion with Shobhaa Dé, William Dalrymple and Vikas Swarup.
"I am looking forward to the reading, and I'm also part of a discussion panel about Indian writers," he said.
Chaudhuri, who was born in Kolkata, pursued his passion for the English language, going on to read it at University College, London, and completing his doctorate in critical theory and poetry of DH Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford.
So far, he has written five novels; his most recent being The Immortals. His criticism and fiction have appeared regularly in most of the major journals in the world, including the London Review of Books, the Times and the New Yorker. He was one of the London Observer's "Twenty-one writers for the Millennium", and one of India Today's "Faces of the Millennium".
"The problem with India is that the industry is not cutthroat, because literature is available in different Indian languages," Chaudhuri said. "The levels of criticism in India are not very high, and obviously funding is a big issue – nobody is going to live off writing."