Anjali Joseph

Anjali Joseph is a prizewinning novelist. She is interested in how art can attune a reader to experience more joy. In Saraswati Park, her first novel, a middleaged Bombay letter writer who collects secondhand books begins tentatively to write in their margins; his teenage nephew tries to find a boyfriend. The book won the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliott prizes and jointly won the Vodafone Crossword book award for fiction in India. In Another Country, Leela, recently graduated, passes her twenties in three cities: Paris, London, and Mumbai. The Living follows two shoemakers, one a single mother in the last surviving shoe factory in Norwich, and the other a maker of traditional chappals in Kolhapur. Keeping in Touch, a fourth novel, is set in Assam and England and is a story of dysfunctional love and the Everlasting Lucifer, a lightbulb with magical properties.

As well as writing novels, Anjali Joseph has taught English and creative writing at the Sorbonne, the University of East Anglia, Queen Mary University of London, Oxford University and the Arvon Foundation among others. She read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia. She lives in Oxford and is working on a novel about the Anglo-Irish naval officer and writer Boyle Somerville.