The Value of Silence: Tishani Doshi with curator Lucy Hyslop
Award-winning author, poet and dancer Tishani Doshi reads from - and premieres - a performance of SMALL DAYS AND NIGHTS, her acclaimed new Bloomsbury novel, during Heckfield's month celebrating the Value of Silence. She is in conversation with Lucy Hyslop, the Assembly's curator, and music during the performance is created by Luca Nardon. Of Welsh-Gujarati descent, Doshi has published seven books of poetry and fiction - a signed copy of her new book will be available to buy. Her essays, poems and short stories have been widely anthologised and she has contributed to the Guardian, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune and The Hindu. Doshi is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for Poetry, winner of the All-India Poetry Competition, and her first book, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006. Her debut novel, The Pleasure Seekers, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize. She lives in Tamil Nadu. Set against the vivid and evocative backdrop of modern India, Small Days and Nights is a story of family, of the ties that bind and the secrets we bury. Escaping her failing marriage, Grace has returned to Pondicherry to cremate her mother. Once there, she finds herself heir to an unexpected inheritance. First, there is the strange pink house, blue-shuttered, out on a spit of the wild beach, haunted by the rattle of fishermen in their catamarans. And then there is the sister she never knew she had: Lucia, who has spent her life in a residential facility. Soon Grace sets up a new and precarious life in this lush, melancholy wilderness, with Lucia, the village housekeeper Mallika, the drily witty Auntie Kavitha and an ever-multiplying litter of puppies. Here in Paramankeni, with its vacant bus stops colonised by flying foxes, its solitary temples and step-wells shielded by canopies of teak and tamarind, where every dusk the fishermen line the beach smoking and mending their nets, Grace feels that she has come to the very end of the world. But Grace’s attempts to play house prove first a struggle, then a strain, as she discovers the chaos, tenderness, fury and bewilderment of life with Lucia. Luminous, funny, surprising and heart-breaking, Small Days and Nights is the story of a woman caught in a moment of transformation, and the sacrifices we make to forge lives that have meaning. Acclaim for Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods: ‘Intelligent, elegant, unflinching’ Kamila Shamsie, Guardian, Best Summer Books, 2018 ‘Tishani Doshi combines artistic elegance with a visceral power to create a breath-taking panorama of danger, memory, beauty and the strange geographies of happiness. This is essential, immediate, urgent work and Doshi is that rare thing, an unashamed visionary’ John Burnside
