Aananth Daksnamurthy on his Journey into Publishing Harshaneeyam

Today’s guest is Aananth Daksnamurthy. He is speaking about his passion for reading and publishing and his upcoming trip to India and Srilaka to look for literature for publication as a part of the SALT initiative.  Aananth Daksnamurthy is a Fulbright scholar graduating with a master's in publishing from New York University. His first book, Acquisition, a Swedish novel titled The Details, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024. Ananth is also part of the SALT contingent, visiting India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh this year and scouting literature for publication in the USA and UK.
SALT—‘South Asian Languages in Translation’ is an initiative by the University of Chicago to bring South Asian literature in English Translation to the Anglophone world. Translators Daniel Hahn, Jason Grunebaum, Arunava Sinha, Daisy Rockwell, and Author VV Ganeshanandan are part of the team leading SALT.
SALT Travel Grant
About the SALT Project
Harshaneeyam: Welcome to Harshaneeyam Aananth.
Aananth Daksnamurthy: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. 
H: How did you develop an interest in literature? 
A: I was born and raised in a small town, Trichy, in Tamil Nadu. From childhood, I started reading pretty early. With all the supplements, usually, the newspaper supplements that come, these are Siruvar Malar, Siruvar Mani, the kid supplementary books I started reading, and mostly newspapers. That's how my literary journey started. I was not a very avid reader initially. I only engaged with news and media in general, but I followed the traditional route of higher education and went on to do engineering. I'm a mechanical engineer with a bachelor's degree and went on to do a postgrad diploma in liberal arts at Ashoka University as a young India fellow. This was partly due to some elective courses I took during my final semester, and I needed to explore more humanities. It gave me a lot of exposure, and two courses stood out.
I took one critical writing course, and I began to write. I became a very effective communicator both in writing and in oral communication. Then, I took another course, Culture and Communication, which was a sociology course. This course gave me a lens on caste, religion, sexuality, and gender. These two courses moulded me into a very different person from who I was initially. Then, I went on to work with ‘The Print’. YIF also gave me a thirst for reading, and I've just started reading a lot of nonfiction. That was a phase when I was reading a lot of nonfiction coming out of Ashoka, more public policy, economics, or history-related nonfiction. I used to go to Delhi Tamil Sangam's library and pick some of these Tamil books there. I initially started with Prabhanjan's short stories, a collection of short stories by the Tamil writer Prabhanjan. I've explored many authors, many genres within Tamil, and contemporary Tamil writing.
And yeah, I've read Jeyamohan. He's a great writer. I love his work. Nooru Naarkaaligal is one of my favourite works from Aram. I've heard so much of S Ra. S Ramakrishnan is another Tamil writer and Sahitya Akademi Award winner. In those days, his videos were podcasts. So, the YouTube videos were an hour or two long. He introduced, at least to this generation, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin. So, a huge introduction to Russian literature came through S. Ramakrishnan. And that's when I remember I started reading much more fiction. Again, short stories were my favourite format. It's also easy to finish short stories and move on to another story, But translated fiction was very recent. I've...