Introducing Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru is an award-winning British novelist famous for authoring several highly acclaimed novels, including The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007) and Gods Without Men (2011). Named among the twenty best young British novelists by Granta in 2003, Kunzru is also a PEN activist and 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. Since his debut novel’s publishing in 2002, he has cemented his role as one of Britain’s most acute observers and commentators on modern life and its intricacies.

Photo credit: Jamie Diamond

“Transmission: A Conversation with Hari Kunzru”, was an event in honour of the author held at Birkbeck, University of London, in June 2014. In the Podcast, Kunzru answers questions about his work and there is additional insight and context provided by experts studying his work. There is also advice on ‘where to start with Kunzru’ for listeners wishing to learn more about the novelist.

A roller-coaster ride of surrealism, dystopia and satirical humour, Kunzru’s works come to life to both challenge preconceptions and shatter the boundaries of genre in contemporary British writing.

This podcast was produced and presented by Jo Barratt, with Isabella Grotto

Transcript

Jo Barratt: Welcome to Pod Academy. In this podcast we welcome the author Hari Kunzru, who came to read and answer some questions about his work at an event at Birkbeck university of London. The event was co-convened by Bianca Leggett, who explained her reasons for bringing this group of academics, writers and fans together to discuss Kunzru's work.

Bianca Leggett: My work looks at British contemporary fiction and new cosmopolitan forms and tries to bridge those things together, which is something Hari's work does. I have been very struck by the sense that Hari Kunzru's work, by being so restless and inventive, really stretches over a great deal of expertise and scholars haven't been brought together before and I was determined to make that happen, and I'm delighted it finally has.

JB: Before Bianca speaks to the author, we're going to get an introduction from some of the attendees on the day. Dave Gunning is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Birmingham.

Dave Gunning: Hari Kunzru first really came into prominence in this country as one of the Granta best young British novelists in 2003 on the strength of his one published novel at that time and academics get worked up about to what extent he can be classed as a British novelist, given the global themes that are inside his work, but certainly they seem to identify the talent correctly. The Impressionist, which also won the Betty Trask prize, is the story of an Indian boy travelling around various identities in the early Twentieth century. It takes a sort of romp through the colonial era, but it's also completely tied in to contemporary concerns about identity, what it means to be authentic, what it might mean to actually possess an identity, and throughout subsequent works we see this mix of an intellectually informed level of understanding of debates around culture, and particularly contemporary culture, tied to this wonderful storytelling sense. We see how the contemporary world is experienced and how people orientate themselves within that. In Transmission, the second novel in 2005, we get a computer virus bringing together the worlds of Bollywood cinema, brand management, fortress Europe, and the low status of Indian "tech" workers in the US. It's a broad, intertwining and very funny book. In 2007, My Revolutions is more serious in tone and revisits the political activism of the 1960s in Britain. In 2011 he revisited this the network novel, his interconnected narratives, in Gods Without Men, with these broad marks of crossing historical periods, both finding a geographical base in the unearthly landscapes of...