KATIE JACOBS AT THE UBUD WRITERS & READERS FESTIVAL

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Sunday, October 11, 2009
KATIE JACOBS AT THE UBUD WRITERS & READERS FESTIVAL
The sessions I attended on Saturday at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival left the overt political sessions behind and it was a much more literary day.

"A panel on "Writing the Sub-Continent" featured Vikas Swarup, (pic left), author of Q&A, Mohammed Hanif, who also attended the Auckland Readers &Writers Festival earlier this year and is the author of "A Case of Exploding Mangoes, and Sushma Joshi, a short story writer, essayist, and documentary maker from Nepal। The first questions asked about place and sub-continent as characters within their fiction, but somewhat surprisingly, especially given the importance of place in all their works, they professed that the settings were mostly incidental, and the plot itself the only consideration."

I responded to this blog:
Hi Beattie, I was surprised to find your blog post and to read that the writers commented that place was not important in their work. I would like to clarify that all three of us said different things and had different takes on our writing process... I do not subscribe to the ethos that place is not important to my writing, especially since all my writing is about Nepal, and it plays a very central part in whatever I write! Thanks again for giving me the chance to comment...
Warm regards, Sushma Joshi
Kathmandu, Nepal

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