Anita Krishan, as an author, has made her mark upon the literary circle of India very impressively. Her books speak for herself and she does not need to be vocal. One of those outstanding authors, Anita Krishan’s writing style is far better than the most remarkable ones in the contemporary fiction who are just following the trails of ‘those’. When we indulge in the debates like who are the true ‘Indian authors’, we need to know the names like of Anita’s and Amitav Ghosh’s and Jhumpa’s. The academic students must have been reading the fiction by the great ones like Raja Rao and R K Narayan and Anand and Desai. In the contemporary generation, the responsibility of carrying the Indianness rests on the shoulders of the authors of the lot in which Anita Krishan is a part.
Born in 1955 in Shimla, Anita has spent her initial part of life in the same city of hills. She completed her Masters in English Literature from Himachal University in 1976 and then began her teaching career as an English professor which was rather longer. Teaching the basics as well as the depths of literature to so many students, Anita also kept producing poems, short stories and also directed plays. However, her literary career on a formal level started only with the publication of her novel Running Up the Hill in 2007. It moved on and Anita wrote the novels The Burning Orchard and Tears of Jhelum and her latest one is Despite Stolen Dreams.
An author on a different journey, Anita Krishan looks to unravel the human emotions and pain which often rest behind the scenes in the novels as well as the visual format – the movies. For example, her latest work Despite Stolen Dreams looks to find the roots of terrorism and the compulsion (or the allurement) which produces terrorism as well as terrorists in the valley of Kashmir. She also looks to make people aware of the mistakes we have made as well as the solutions which we might implement and get some kind of redemption. Her fiction is not problematic kind – she is rather tending towards a fiction of problem-solving nature.
Though the diction is simple and reader-friendly, Anita Krishan’s writing style is nothing like the today’s authors. She writes in a dignified manner and with certain lyrical qualities at her command. It will certainly sound pleasant to the readers as the words connect to each other to form the sentences creating a kind of sonorous flow…
At present, Anita is working on her further novels and also contributes as a senior columnist to The Indian Economist. Her books can be found on Amazon India and for your convenience, the links to purchase her books are below: