SynopsisIn Listen to Me, Deshpande opens up about her life and work. She writes about being a writer and a feminist, and the shaping of these selves. She draws us into her world: growing up in Dharwad as Kannada littérateur Shriranga’s daughter, moving to Bombay as a student, figuring out her identity as a newly married woman, and negotiating the unfamiliar world of Indian publishing—and always, always her love of reading. As she talks about influences, detractors and challenges, the genesis of her own work shines through.
This book is not a fight to claim a piece of public memory, and definitely not an act of self-aggrandisement. It is an acute observation of an eventful era in Indian literature and history, and a micro-history of Deshpande’s own engagement with it, through her certain and uncertain recollections. With its chiselled prose and honest self-knowledge, it revitalises that most delicate of endeavours: the writerly memoir.
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Binding: HardBack
About the author
Shashi Deshpande, daughter of the renowned Kannada dramatist and Sanskrit scholar Shriranga, was born in Dharwad. At the age of fifteen she went to Mumbai, graduated in economics, then moved to Bangalore, where she gained a degree in law. Her writing career began in earnest only in 1970, initially with short stories, of which several volumes have been published. She is the author of four children`s books and seven previous novels, the best known of which are The Dark Holds No Terror, That Long Silence, which won the Sahitya Akademi award, and Small Remedies. Shashi started writing children`s stories for her two young sons. She recreated her own happy childhood in a small town in her first book, A Summer Adventure, and subsequently wrote two more adventure books. The Naraynpur Incident, her fourth book for children was based on th 1942 Quit India Movement. Shashi Deshpande is an award-winning Indian novelist.
