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In conversation with Pankaj Mishra

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Friday November 3, 2023

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20.20 - 21.05

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EVENING PROGRAMME

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Festivaltent The Hideout

Interviewer

Maurits Chabot

Image for Pankaj Mishra

Photographer:
Windham Campbell Prize

Author

Pankaj Mishra

Acclaimed Indian writer and essayist Pankaj Mishrah has dissected modern India in nonfiction classics including Age of Anger and From the Ruins of Empire, while also addressing themes of class and economic injustice in a number of novels.

His latest novel Run and Hide (published in Dutch as Heen Komen) returns to these themes, telling the story of Arun, who dreams of escaping his family, small town life, and low caste. At the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, he meets two friends who are willing to go to any length to succeed. Arun's friends become the financial wizards of their generation. From New York to Tuscany, they live out their Gatsby-esque fantasies with private jets, money, and sex, without realising the personal cost.

Arun fails to leverage his elite education for social capital, instead pursuing life as a writer, retreating to a small village in the Himalayas with his ageing mother and working as a translator. But when a young woman, Alia, arrives researching a story about a global financial scandal, his relationship with his group of friends is about to change forever.

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