Rohinton Mistry
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Rohinton Mistry
(b.1952). Born in Bombay, India, he completed his bachelor's degree at St Xavier's College, University of Bombay. He immigrated to Canada in 1975, worked for a time as a bank clerk, and also earned a B.A. (1982) at the University of Toronto. He lives in Brampton, Ontario, and is a full-time writer.
Mistry's gift for writing fiction became evident when, as an undergraduate, he won the prestigious short-story contest conducted by Hart House at the University of Toronto in both 1983 and 1984. Since then he has published a collection of short stories entitled Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987) and two novels, Such a long journey (1991), which won a Governor General's Award, and A fine balance (1995), which won the Giller Prize.
Very few writers—Bapsi Sidhwa (b.1938) is a notable exception—have so consistently and so rigorously dealt with the Parsi community as Mistry has. A Parsi himself, Mistry for the most part has set his fiction in India, and has focused on the aspirations, heroism, weaknesses, and marginality of the Parsi community with sympathy, humour, and love. Very much a realist, his strength lies in his capacity to create a strikingly referential surface and to draw his readers into the complex world he creates. In both his novels the political—particularly the period dominated by Indira Gandhi—and the personal intersect, and if at times the connection seems forced, it certainly leads to a completeness without which his characters would seem less engrossing. A fine balance also marks a growing point in that it reveals a desire to move beyond the Parsi community to extend the scope of his fiction.
Mistry's work lacks the metafictional quality of Salman Rushdie or the artifice of Amitav Ghosh, yet his work is no less important in the way it chooses to reflect, in the lives of a small community in India, the concerns that confront diasporic communities. Issues of marginality, essentialism, hegemony, and assimilation are not foregrounded in his writing, but reading about the lives of the characters he so painstakingly creates is to recognize what it means to live on the cusp and to assert one's identity in the face of opposition that threatens to engulf it.
(See Ajay Heble, ‘"A foreign presence in the stall": towards a poetics of cultural hybridity in Rohinton Mistry's migration stories’, Canadian literature (Summer 1993);) (Arun Mukherjee, ‘Narrating India: Rohinton Mistry's Such a long journey’ in Oppositional aesthetics: readings from a hyphenated space (1994);) (Gordon Ekelund, ‘Left the station: the portrayal of women in Mistry's Such a long journey’, The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad (Summer 1995);) (Nilufer Bharucha, ‘"When old tracks are lost": Rohinton Mistry's fiction as diasporic discourse’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 30/2 (1995).)
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Rohinton Mistry
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Rohinton Mistry (born 3 July 1952) is an Indian-born Canadian writer in English. Residing in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, Mistry is of Indian origin, originally from Mumbai. He practices Zoroastrianism and belongs to the Parsi community. Mistry is a Neustadt International Prize for Literature laureate (2012).[1]
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Biography
Rohinton Mistry was born in 1952 in Mumbai, India. He earned a BA in Mathematics and Economics at the University of Mumbai. He emigrated to Canada with his wife in 1975, settling in Toronto where he studied at the University of Toronto and received a BA in English and Philosophy.[2] He worked in a bank for a while, before returning to studies, leading up to a degree in English and philosophy. While attending the University of Toronto he won two Hart House literary prizes (the first to win two), for stories which were published in the Hart House Review, and Canadian Fiction Magazine's annual Contributor's Prize for 1985. Two years later, Penguin Books Canada published his collection of 11 short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag. It was later published in the United States as Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag.[3] The book consists of 11 short stories, all set within one apartment complex in modern-day Mumbai. This volume contains the oft-anthologized story, "Swimming Lessons."
When his second book, the novel Such a Long Journey, was published in 1991, it won the Governor General's Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, and the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award.[3] It was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize and for the Trillium Award. It has been translated into German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Japanese, and has been made into the 1998 film Such a Long Journey.
His third book, and second novel, A Fine Balance (1995), won the second annual Giller Prize in 1995, and in 1996, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. It was selected for Oprah's Book Club[4] in November 2001 and sold hundreds of thousands of additional copies throughout North America as a result. It won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers Prize and was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker prize.[5]
In 2002, Mistry cancelled his United States book tour for his novel Family Matters (2002) because he and his wife were targeted by security agents at every airport he visited, apparently because Mistry appeared to be Muslim. Mistry reported that on his first flight of the tour, "we were greeted by a ticket agent who cheerfully told us we had been selected randomly for a special security check. Then it began to happen at every single stop, at every single airport. The random process took on a 100 percent certitude." His publisher issued a statement that said, "As a person of color [Mistry] was stopped repeatedly and rudely at each airport along the way—to the point where the humiliation ... had become unbearable."
Family Matters is a consideration of the difficulties that come with aging, which Mistry returned to in 2008 with the short fiction The Scream (published as a separate volume, in support of World Literacy of Canada, with illustrations by Tony Urquhart).
His books portray diverse facets of Indian socioeconomic life; as well as Parsi Zoroastrian life, customs, and religion. Many of his writings are markedly "Indo-nostalgic".
His literary papers are housed at the Clara Thomas Archives at York University.
Bibliography
- Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), also published as Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag (1989)
- Such a Long Journey (1991)
- A Fine Balance (1995)
- Family Matters (2002)
- The Scream (2006)
Awards and recognition
- 1983: Hart House Literary Contest, "One Sunday"
- 1984: Hart House Literary Contest, "Auspicious Occasion"
- 1985: Annual Contributors' Prize, Canadian Fiction Magazine
- 1991: Man Booker Prize, shortlist, Such a Long Journey
- 1991: Governor General's Award, Such a Long Journey
- 1992: Commonwealth Writers Prize, Overall Winner Best Book, Such a Long Journey
- 1992: Books in Canada First Novel Award, Such a Long Journey
- 1995: Giller Prize, A Fine Balance
- 1996: Man Booker Prize, shortlist, A Fine Balance
- 1996: Commonwealth Writers Prize, Overall Winner Best Book, A Fine Balance
- 1997: Irish Times International Fiction Prize, shortlist, A Fine Balance
- 2002: James Tait Black Memorial Prize, shortlist, Family Matters
- 2002: Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, winner, Family Matters
- 2002: Man Booker Prize, shortlist, Family Matters
- 2002: Canada Reads, A Fine Balance
- 2012: Neustadt International Prize for Literature[6]
References
- ^ "Critically acclaimed Indian-Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry wins 2012 Neustadt International Prize for Literature". World Literature Today. http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/news-2012neustadtlaureate.html.
- ^ "The Man Booker Prize". The Man Booker Prize. http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/authors/58. Retrieved 2012-01-16.
- ^ a b Malieckal, Bindu (2000). "Rohinton Mistry". In Nelson, Emmanuel Sampath (Ed.), Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, pp. 219-28. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0-313-30911-6.
- ^ New, William H. (2003). A History of Canadian Literature, (3d ed.), p. 326. McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0-7735-2597-1.
- ^ Faber and Faber paperback edition 1997
- ^ "Critically acclaimed Indian-Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry wins 2012 Neustadt International Prize for Literature". World Literature Today. http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/news-2012neustadtlaureate.html. Retrieved 4 January 2012.
External links
- Rohinton Mistry biographical and critical information by James Proctor
- Biography from the English Department at Emory University
- Rohinton Mistry's entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia
- Faber reading guide for 'A Fine Balance'
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