Neelum Saran Gour

Neelum Saran Gour[3][4] (born 12 October 1955) is a well-known Indian English writer of fiction who represents a special category of fiction that arose in the early 1990s and depicted the world of North India's small towns and their vibrant cultural histories. She is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories and one work of literary non-fiction. She has edited a pictorial volume on the history and culture of the city of Allahabad, where she lives and works, and has also translated one of her early novels into Hindi. In recent years she has come to be recognized as one of the leading practitioners of Indian English fiction coming out of the North Indian heartland.

Neelum Saran Gour
Neelum Saran Gour reading at the literary event, Memory as Muse,[2]Oxford Bookstore, New Delhi
Born (1955-10-12) 12 October 1955
Allahabad, India
OccupationWriter and academic
LanguageEnglish, Hindi
NationalityIndian
Alma materAllahabad University
GenreFiction
Website
www.neelumsarangour.com

Early life and education

Born in Allahabad, Neelum Saran Gour is the child of a Bengali mother and a Hindiphone father and was exposed to an array of languages and cultural influences in her childhood. Educated in St. Mary's Convent Inter College, a school run by Roman Catholic nuns, she went on to study History, Philosophy and English Literature at the University of Allahabad in the early nineteen seventies. In the course of an outstanding career in University, where she topped consistently in every academic year, she won ten gold and silver medals for academic brilliance. Soon afterwards in 1977 she was appointed Lecturer in English in the Department of English at the Allahabad University. She has taught at the University since 1977 and now holds the position of Professor in her subject, English Literature. Her real identity is that of a prolific novelist, short story writer, folklorist, reviewer, critic and online columnist.

Career

Neelum Saran Gour's first writings were magazine stories published in popular Indian literary magazines of the nineteen eighties. One of these was spotted by the Managing Director of the newly opened Penguin India, David Davidar, and he solicited her for a volume of short stories. The famous debut collection Grey Pigeon And Other Stories[5] was released by Penguin India in 1993. It received rave reviews, winning Gour a Writers’ Fellowship in Britain from the Charles Wallace India Trust . Her next book, a novel, was titled Speaking of '62[6] and was published by Penguin in 1995. This was followed in 1997 by Winter Companions And Other Stories.[7][8] In 2002 appeared Virtual Realities[9][10] and in 2005 two novels were published, Sikandar Chowk Park[11][12][13] by Penguin, and Messres Dickens, Doyle and Wodehouse Pvt.Ltd.[14] by Halcyon Books. Both received highly positive reviews in many Indian magazines and journals, bringing Gour to the forefront of Indian fiction writing. Her work was covered by critical volumes of international stature like the Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-colonial Literatures, edited by Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly,[15] The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Women’s Writing, edited by Lorna Sage, Germaine Greer and Elaine Showalter,[16] Companion to Indian Fiction In English, edited by Pier Paolo Piciucco,[17] and Indian English Literature 1980 -2000 by M.K.Naik and Shyamala Narayan.[18] Recent critical writings on her work are included in Emerging South Asian Writers, Edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Deborah Fillerup Weagel[19] and in Contemporary Fiction: An Anthology of Female Writers, edited by Vandana Pathak, Urmila Dabir and Shubha Mishra.[20] 2009 witnessed the release of the pictorial volume Allahabad Where The Rivers Meet,[21] edited by Gour and published by Marg Publications. It was a runaway best-seller, earning Gour the position of Allahabad's representative literary voice to a large readership of the Indian diaspora. In 2010 Penguin –Yatra published a Hindi translation of Gour's early novel Speaking of 62, done by Gour herself and titled '62 Ki Baatein . 2011 saw the launch of Song Without End And Other Stories[22][23][24] by Penguin. A work of non-fiction followed in 2015, the celebrated literary history of the Allahabad University, Three Rivers And A Tree – The Story Of Allahabad University,[25][26][27][28][29][30] published by Rupa Publications. This was followed, in the same year, by Allahabad Aria,[31] also published by Rupa Publications and Invisible Ink,[32][33] published in late 2015 by HarperCollins. Her latest novel is Requiem In Raga Janki,[34][35][36][37] published in June 2018 by Penguin Viking.

Apart from these exclusively authored works, her work has appeared in numerous fiction and non-fiction anthologies like: Desert in Bloom- Contemporary Indian Women’s Fiction In English,[38] edited by Meenakshi Bharat,( Pencraft International, 2004), Growing Up As A Woman Writer, edited by Jasbir Jain (Sahitya Akademi and Sage Publications 2007), The Fear Factor,[39] Edited by Sharon Rundle and Meenakshi Bharat (Picador, 2009), Only Connect, edited by Sharon Rundle and Meenakshi Bharat (Brass Monkey, Australia and Rupa Publications,India,2014)), Indian English And Vernacular India, edited by Makarand Paranjape and G.J.V.Prasad (Pearson 2010), The Creative Process- Seven Essays,(The Institute for Research in Interdisciplinary Studies, 2013 )and Learning Non-violence,[40] edited by Gangeya Mukherji (Oxford University Press, 2016). Gour's critical writings include Raja Rao’s Metaphysical Trilogy,( Kitab Mahal, 1992) as also her book reviews for The Indian Review Of Books and for the Times Literary Supplement[41]. As a journalist she was a humour columnist for the Allahabad page of The Hindustan Times. She has conducted Creative Writing workshops for the Sahitya Akademi and the Central University of Rajasthan, researched and worked on a BBC T.V. Series Who Do You Think You Are?[42] in which Rupert Penry-Jones searched for his family history, aired internationally on 16 August 2010. Her novel Sikandar Chowk Park was prescribed for study in the M.A. course of the Charles University Prague. Her story A Lane In Lucknow is prescribed for study in the M.A. course of the U.G.C.’s e- Pathshala project.

Awards

References
  1. Singh, Aatika (8 May 2016). "Of moods and memories". The Hindu. Retrieved 27 July 2016.
  2. Singh, Aatika (8 May 2016). "Of moods and memories". The Hindu. Retrieved 27 July 2016.
  3. "Chronicling Allahabad University". www.dailypioneer.com. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  4. "Allahabad University: A lore collector's recollections". The Hindu. 9 July 2015. ISSN 0971-751X. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  5. Gour, Neelum Saran (25 February 1988). "Grey Pigeon" and Other Stories. New Delhi, India; New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books Ltd. ISBN 9780140107937.
  6. Gour, Neelam Saran (28 September 1995). Speaking of '62. New Delhi; New York, N.Y., USA: Penguin Books Australia. ISBN 9780140245943.
  7. Gour, Neelum Saran (1 February 1997). Winter Companions and Other Stories (2 ed.). New Delhi; New York, NY: Penguin Books India. ISBN 9780140249897.
  8. "Book review: Winter Companions and Other Stories by Neelam S. Gour". Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  9. Gour, Neelum Saran (10 December 2001). Virtual Realities. New Delhi, India; London: Penguin India. ISBN 9780143028062.
  10. "Neelum Saran Gour talks about her new novel Virtual Realities". Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  11. "Sikandar Chowk Park - Neelum Saran Gour". www.mylibrary.britishcouncil.org. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  12. "...And The Holy Gosht". Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  13. "Book review: Sikandar Chowk Park by Neelum Saran Gour". Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  14. "A Brain-teaser". www.thebookreviewindia.org. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  15. "Routledge Literature Online". www.routledgeonline.com. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  16. Sage, Lorna; Greer, Germaine; Showalter, Elaine (30 September 1999). The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521668132.
  17. Piciucco, Pier Paolo (1 January 2004). A Companion to Indian Fiction in English. Atlantic Publishers & Dist. ISBN 9788126903108.
  18. Narayan, Shyamala A. (1 September 1994). "India". The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 29 (3): 53–85. doi:10.1177/002198949402900303. ISSN 0021-9894.
  19. Title : Emerging South Asian Women Writers. ISBN 9781454192114. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  20. Dabir, Urmila (1 January 2008). Contemporary Fiction: An Anthology of Female Writers. Sarup & Sons. ISBN 9788176258357.
  21. Gour, Neelum Saran, ed. (1 September 2009). Allahabad: Where the Rivers Meet. The Marg Foundation. ISBN 9788185026947.
  22. "The Sunday Tribune - Books". www.tribuneindia.com. Retrieved 17 July 2016.
  23. InpaperMagazine, From (24 March 2012). "FICTION: Exploring conflicting realities". Retrieved 17 July 2016.
  24. "Short with depth". The Hindu. 30 November 2011. ISSN 0971-751X. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  25. "Campus chronicles". Retrieved 17 July 2016.
  26. Gour, Neelum Saran (1 July 2015). Three Rivers and a Tree. Rupa Publications India. ASIN B016APQK4I.
  27. "Biblio: A Review of Books". biblio-india.org. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  28. "A raconteur from the place of offerings". Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  29. "Learning At The Sangam". Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  30. "Saga of a Fading Relic". www.thebookreviewindia.org. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  31. "Where different worlds meet". Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  32. "Invisible Ink". Goodreads. Retrieved 17 July 2016.
  33. "Transformed relationships". Deccan Herald. 30 January 2016. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  34. "Requiem In Raga Janki". Goodreads. Retrieved 20 January 2019.
  35. Balantrapu, Mihir (September 2018). "'Requiem in Raga Janki': A fictionalised biography of Jankibai Illahabadi". the Hindu. Retrieved 1 September 2018.
  36. "Requiem in Raga Janki by Neelum Saran Gour". freepressjournal. Retrieved 9 September 2018.
  37. "THE SONG OF FIFTY-SIX KNIVES". Dawn. 15 July 2018. Retrieved 15 July 2018.
  38. Bharat, Meenakshi (1 January 2004). Desert in Bloom: Contemporary Indian Women's Fiction In English. Pencraft International. ISBN 9788185753591.
  39. Bharat, Meenakshi (14 December 2015). Troubled Testimonies: Terrorism and the English novel in India. Routledge. ISBN 9781317333791.
  40. Learning Non-Violence. Oxford University Press. 9 November 2015. ISBN 9780199458431.
  41. "You searched for neelum saran gour – TheTLS". TheTLS. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  42. "Rupert Penry-Jones, Series 7, Who Do You Think You Are? - BBC One". BBC. Retrieved 17 July 2016.
  43. "Noted writer Neelum Saran Gour bags The Hindu fiction prize for 2018". The Hindu. 13 January 2019.
  44. "Writers Neelum Saran Gour and Manoranjan Byapari win The Hindu Prize 2018". Scroll. Retrieved 13 January 2019.
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