With global and national affairs buffeted by competing narratives about nationhood, citizenship and personhood, storytelling is an important factor influencing politics at home and abroad.
That’s the topic of a public conversation on Nov. 10 with two people who write narratives: Indian-American novelist Karan Mahajan and author Suketu Mehta at Manhattanville College.
— an announcement from the India Cultural Center
Mehta and Mahajan will talk about the urgency of storytelling in this geopolitical landscape, delving into the role of geography in defining writers and writing, the necessity of self-expression and narrative as a catalyst for belonging.
“The Global War of Storytelling” is presented by the Greenwich-based India Cultural Center and hosted by the Manhattanville College MFA in Writing Program.
The event will take place at 7 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 10. in Reid Castle at Manhattanville College in Harrison, New York, just over the border from Greenwiich. A reception will immediately follow.
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Suketu Mehta has won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction.
Suketu Mehta is the author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award.
He has won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University.
His book about global migration, This Land is Our Land, was published in 2019 and he is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of NYU and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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Karan Mahajan, a novelist, essayist, and critic was born in Stamford and grew up in New Delhi.
Karan Mahajan’s first book, Family Planning, was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Awards and was named one of the “10 Best Books of 2016” by The New York Times.
Karan’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker Online, The New Republic and other venues. Mahajan is an associate professor in literary arts at Brown University.
India Cultural Center (ICC) is a non-profit organization that celebrates the arts and culture of India. Its mission is to foster inclusion by educating and engaging the community in Indian culture. Programs are targeted towards both the Indian American diaspora and the community at large.
The ICC Speaker Series brings boldfaced names in entertainment, journalism, literature, business, medicine, the arts and other fields to Fairfield and Westchester counties.