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How to pronounce Hari Kunzru: HAR-ee KUNE-zroo
Hari Kunzru is the author of seven novels, Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, The Impressionist and Blue Ruin. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the "Easy Chair" column for Harper's Magazine. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone, from Pushkin Industries. He lives in Brooklyn.
Hari Kunzru's website
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Described by The Observer as 'The most eagerly awaited British debut
of 2002,' Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist is an epic tale of adventure and
discovery. Here, we asked Hari about inspiration, identity and the cultural
legacy of the British Empire.
How would you describe the The Impressionist?
The Impressionist is a black comedy about race and identity. It goes from
India to England to Paris to Africa following one character, Pran, who assumes a
great deal of different identities and never quite fits into any of them.
Where did the idea for the book come from?
Part of the idea came from my own experience of being the child of an Indian
father and an English mother. I've grown up in England and feel pretty English
in my upbringing, but there's always been an aspect of my experience that hasn't
quite fitted. I wanted to write something about a character like that, only I've
reversed the polarities in a way. Pran is the child of an English father and an
Indian mother and I've set the book at a time (the 1920s) - maybe the last time
- when the Empire really mattered. It's at a crisis point in the story of the
British Empire, which of course is kind of why I m here. My father would never
have come to Britain if ...
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