Biographica
I am a fiction writer. I am a few other things too, but I do spend a lot of my time thinking about imaginary people and their problems. It’s an odd existence, perhaps not the sort of thing grown-ups should be doing. People sometimes ask me if I had always wanted to be a writer. No, I had not. When I was about eight or nine, I wanted to be an accountant. My friends, when asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, would reply “engineer!” or “doctor!” Not me. I was going to be an accountant. I couldn’t wait to be an accountant.
For me, accountants represented the height of cool. That was because my late father was an accountant with Maharashtra’s Office of the Accountant General. He worked for a General! At dinner time, he would talk about his day at the office. Father invariably made accountancy sound as exciting as exploring Mars or wind surfing or being a detective. His eyes would shine, his fingers would draw numbers in the air, and in the mornings, as he got ready for work, he would hum. I wanted a slice of the same happiness pizza.
Instead, I became a fiction writer. It took me a while not to be an accountant. I studied to be a computer scientist and then worked as a software engineer for many years, worrying about things like secure distributed databases and evolutionary computation. It was a blast, but eventually I decided to become a writer. Once, I used to drum up plausible reasons for the career shift, but these days I’m more skeptical about our supposed motives and reasons. I write because I love to write because I write.
I write all kinds of stories. When I’m cornered about genre preferences, I say most of my recent work probably falls under speculative fiction. That includes stuff like magic realism, surrealism, fabulist fiction, slipstream, science fiction, fantasy and so on. If you’ve never heard of speculative fiction, I have an explanation right here. Or you could try Naiyer Masud’s Sheesha Ghat or a Kannada folktale, A Story And A Song. Truth is, I don’t take genre labels seriously. We must not to let a division of labor become a division of laborers. This goes for writers as well as readers. Personally, I read the way a goat eats; that is, anything and everything. I hope you do too.
My most recent novel Half Of What I Say (Bloomsbury, 2015) was shortlisted for the 2016 Hindu Literary Award. My debut novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet was shortlisted for the 2009 Crossword Prize and the Carl Baxter Society’s Parallax Award. Along with Vandana Singh, I co-edited Breaking the Bow (Zubaan Books, 2012), an international anthology of short fiction inspired by the Ramayana. My stories have been translated into more than a dozen languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Igbo, and Romanian. A collection of my speculative short fiction, The Inconceivable Idea Of The Sun: Stories (Hachette), will be published in Spring 2022.
Along with Pervin Saket (among other things, a poet) and Akshat Nigam (among other things, a playwright), I co-founded the Dum Pukht Writers’ Workshop. This annual two-week residential workshop, currently in its fifth iteration, is held at the Adishakti Theatre Complex in the former French colony Puducherry (Pondicherry) in Tamil Nadu.
When I talk about writing, my eyes shine, my fingers gesture in the air, and in the mornings, as I get ready for work, I hum. Remember I said I wanted a slice of the happiness pizza? Well friend, it tastes great! I hope you’ll have as much pleasure reading my stories as I had writing them. Thank you for visiting.
ANIL MENON
iam@anilmenon.com
In The News
Fifth Big History Conference. ReVisioning our World. Discussants: David Baker, Nagarjuna Gadiraju, Andrey Korotayev, Anil Menon. Moderator: David Christian. August 3, 2021.
Science Friday/Brooklyn Public Library. Enhancing Moods, One Brain Chip At A Time:The Science of Anil Menon’s The Robots of Eden: Discussion with neuroscience researcher and artist Suzanne Dikker. Thu, Feb 4 2021.
Papercuts Magazine, Vol. 18. , Theme: Dead Mediums; Anil Menon, guest editor. August 1, 2017.
The Punch Magazine: Interview. December 24, 2016.
The Hindu: Interview by Suneetha Balakrishan. December 10, 2016.
The Indian Express: Interview by Manjula Padmanabhan. October 10, 2016.
Review: Charles Adler’s Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Current Science 107(1) 2014. pp. 121-122.
Conversation with Anil Menon & Vandana Singh.
Chie and Weng Read Books.
May 24, 2014