Raj Kamal Jha
Raj
Kamal Jha (born 1966) is an Indian novelist and journalist.
Jha was born in
Bihar and was raised in Kolkata, West Bengal, where
he went to school at St. Joseph's College. He then
attended the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
where he did his bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering,
(but perhaps more significantly, had his first brush
with journalism as the editor of the campus magazine,
Alankar, where his first short fiction appeared).
After graduating from IIT, he went to the Graduate
School of Journalism at the University of Southern
California, where he received his M.A. in 1990.
Jha was an Assistant
Editor (News) at The
Statesman in Kolkata, a Senior Associate Editor
at India Today, New
Delhi, and since 2001 has been working as the Executive
Editor of The Indian Express which he joined
in 1996 as Deputy Editor. He lives in New Delhi.
Jha is the author
of three published novels.
His first novel, The Blue Bedspread won the 2000 Commonwealth
Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia
region) and was a New York
Times Notable Book of the Year. His second
novel If You Are Afraid of
Heights was a finalist for the Hutch-Crossword
Book Award in 2003. He has also been short-listed
for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Guardian
First Book Award.
His third novel, Fireproof, debuted
in German at the Frankfurt
Book Fair in October 2006 (published by Goldmann).
It was published to wide critical acclaim by Picador
in India in December and in the UK in February 2007.
French and Italian editions are due in 2007-8.
Set against the
backdrop of the 2002 Gujarat violence, the first attack
on innocent Muslim civilians after 9/11, the novel
is a chilling, magical tale of a father and his deformed
son on a journey across a city where the ghosts of
those killed have decided to seek justice.
Jha's fiction is
known for its stark simplicity and ability to evoke
emotion through attention to detail, strongly grounded
in contemporary Indian themes around change, often
taking off from newspaper pages. From domestic violence
to the urban-rural divide and, in his latest novel,
mass violence and communal tension, Jha's books engage
with disturbing subjects unusual in contemporary writing
in English but capture those realities of India that
escape the mainstream media. His writing, simple as
it appears, often calls for a lot of reader participation
which evokes sharp, divided reaction.
Jha's fiction has
been translated into more
than a dozen European languages, including
French, German, Italian, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish,
Spanish and Finnish. His short
stories have appeared in French
and German anthologies as well. His work has
been featured in several
international literary festivals, including Hay-on-Wye, Munich Writers' Festival, Melbourne Writers' Festival and the Los Angeles Times
Book Festival.
Jha was recently
a visiting professor at the graduate school of journalism at the University
of California, Berkeley where he taught a course
on reporting on India. He was also a fellow at the
Yaddo Residency in Saratoga Springs, New York, in
2005.
Works
-
2006-7: Fireproof,
novel
-
2006: "Zwischen den Welten"
Short fiction in a German anthology
-
2003: If You Are Afraid of
Heights, novel
-
2001: The Blue Bedspread,
novel
