[LifeStyle] Amit Chaudhuri’s Finding the Raga wins the James Tait Black prize in the biography category

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Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music by novelist and academic Amit Chaudhuri, has won the biography prize in the James Tait Black Prizes, an annual award from the University of Edinburgh — the UK’s longest-running literary prize.

 

Published by Penguin India, the book is “by turns essay, memoir and cultural study”, detailing Chaudhuri’s personal relationship with north Indian music and its evolution over the years. Simon Cooke, among the jury in the biography category where the book won, called the work one of “great depth, subtlety, and resonance, which unobtrusively changed the way we thought about music, place and creativity. Folding the ethos of the raga into its own form, it is a beautifully voiced, quietly subversive masterpiece in the art of listening to the world”.

 

Chaudhuri, a professor of creative writing at the Ashoka University, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009 and was Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia from 2006 to 2021. He is also a singer in the Hindustani music tradition and has performed internationally. He has released two recordings of his singing and has often written on his experiences with classical music, his style described as having “no obvious plot, no determined design, no fakes or other drama … [with] the effect [being] closer to documentary than to fiction,” in The New Yorker.

 

The James Tait Black Prizes date back over a century, after Janet Tait Black née Coats – from the thread-making family J&P Coats – made a provision in her will for the creation of two annual book prizes in the memory of her husband, James Tait Black. Every year, two academic judges work with postgraduate student readers to evaluate the entries.

 

Source.