Monday 6 February 2017

Paul Beatty Interview at Kolkata Lit Meet - Jan 25, 2017



Paul Beatty's Booker Prize winning novel, The Sellout, is the fiction selected for reading at KRG in the month of May. KumKum and Joe were in Kolkata for a week and it so happened the Kolkata Lit Meet (Kalam) was on at the same time

They took the opportunity of attending a session at which the author was interviewed. 

Sandip Roy (SR), author and interviewer, sat down with Paul Beatty (PB) for a chat. A few hundred people attended the evening session in the eastern lawns of the Victoria Memorial under a billowing shamiana, as the sun was going down behind the VM. While the conversation turned on several issues, including the election of the US President (Mr Trump), it was mainly about Mr Beatty's latest novel:


The cover shows Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek philosopher who, legend has it, went  around with a lit lantern in broad daylight, saying he was ‘looking for an honest man’. In the book too there is a black man with white trousers and a pink shirt, and the reader will wonder what he is searching for.

KumKum gets a front-seat audience with Paul Beatty
(Beatty's wife, Althea Amrik Wasow, is behind KumKum's left shoulder)