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Born in the eastern town of Rourkela, Badami spent her childhood drifting around India as
her father, a mechanical engineer and train designer, was transferred
frequently. Her family moved at least eight times before she was twenty. Since
her parents both spoke different Indian dialects, English was the bridging
language for the family. (Badami's second language is Hindi.) The convent nuns
who took care of her schooling were not always a receptive audience for Badami's
budding literary talents. "Dear child," one of her teachers commented
in response to a writing assignment, "what big lies you tell. Please ask
your mother to see me." At school the nuns taught Greek and Roman myths,
and even Celtic tales. "The only mythology I don't remember learning in
school was Hindu mythology," Anita recalls. At home, however, Badami was
immersed in the cultures and myths of her family and the multilingual railway
workers. This mélange of myths informed Badami's formidable storytelling
ability and shaped the exploration of heroism that runs throughout her latest
novel.
In 1991 Anita Rau Badami left Bangalore in southern India to join her husband in
Calgary, where he went to pursue his Masters in Environmental Science and then
to Vancouver for a PhD in Planning. Arriving with their four-year-old son and
five hundred dollars, the family was soon ensconced in a depressing basement
apartment. To earn money, the former journalist, ad copywriter and children's
writer ended up selling china in a mall. Of this time, Badami says, "I
learned an awful lot about figurines and place settings, but I also made the
most wonderful friends."
Badami began taking creative writing courses and wound up with Tamarind Mem, her
master's thesis project at the University of Calgary. She sent the manuscript to
Penguin Canada and quickly found herself a bestselling author with a reputation
as a talented new Canadian writer. Her stories of home and away, of here and
there, made her a part of the tradition Badami refers to as the
post-postcolonial-immigrant school that began with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's
Children. "I don't think I could have written a novel if I had not left
India," Badami said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. "I
find that the distance gives me perspective and passion. I was twenty-nine years
in India and ten years here, so I have a foot in India and a couple of toes
here. I am both doomed and blessed, to be suspended between two worlds, always
looking back, but with two gorgeous places to inhabit, in my imagination or my
heart."
Just after the publication of The Hero's Walk, Anita Rau Badami won the
prestigious Marian Engel Award, given to a Canadian woman author in mid-career
for outstanding prose writing. (Previous recipients include Carol Shields, Jane
Urquhart, Bonnie Burnard and Barbara Gowdy.) Most recently, The Hero's Walk
was optioned for film by a Canadian producer of See Spot Run Films in Los
Angeles.
This biography was last updated on 11/01/2002.
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