India Cultural Center Speaker Series presents The Global War of Storytelling, a conversation with writers Suketu Mehta & Karan Mahajan Hosted by Manhattanville College MFA in Writing Program

 

Greenwich, CT – The India Cultural Center (ICC) will present The Global War of Storytelling, a conversation with writers Suketu Mehta and Karan Mahajan on Thursday, November 10 at 7pm hosted by the Manhattanville College MFA in Writing Program. The event will take place in Reid Castle at Manhattanville College with an author’s reception immediately following. The event is free and open to the public. 

The ICC Speaker Series brings boldfaced names in entertainment, journalism, literature, business, medicine, the arts and other fields to Fairfield and Westchester counties. The series launched this winter with actor, writer, and former Obama White House staffer Kal Penn, and is made possible with the generous support of Blanca and Sunil Hirani. 

With multiple competing narratives fracturing global and national politics, storytelling has rarely been more important than in the current climate. Those who can control narratives about nationhood, citizenship, and personhood will have the power to dictate the future. Writer Suketu Mehta will speak with novelist Karan Mahajan about the urgency of storytelling in this geopolitical landscape, delving into the role of geography in defining writers and writing, the necessity of self-expression, and narrative as a catalyst for belonging. 

Suketu Mehta is the author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award.  He has won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. His book about global migration, This Land is Our Land, was published in June 2019 and he is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of NYU and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

Karan Mahajan’s first book, Family Planning, was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Awards and was named one of the "10 Best Books of 2016" by The New York Times. Karan's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker Online, The New Republic and other venues. Mahajan is an associate professor in Literary Arts at Brown University.  

Support has been provided to India Cultural Center from CT Humanities (CTH), with funding provided by the Connecticut State Department of Economic and Community Development/Connecticut Office of the Arts (COA) from the Connecticut State Legislature. 

India Cultural Center is a non-profit organization that celebrates the arts and culture of India. Its mission is to foster inclusion by educating and engaging the community in Indian culture. Programs are targeted towards both the Indian American diaspora and the community at large. https://www.iccgreenwich.org/ 

Manhattanville College MFA in Writing Program 

Manhattanville College’s MFA in Writing Program offers students workshops in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and writing for teens and young adults as well as craft classes on the novel; formal experimentation; writing race, class, and gender in fiction; and the prose poem, among others. More than simply being a 36-credit master’s degree program, Manhattanville MFA fosters a dedicated community of writers, who value diverse voices, formal dexterity, and engagement with the local and national literary scene. To this end Manhattanville MFA offers a number of programs that are open to the public, including Summer Writers’ Week, Saturday Writer’s Hub Workshops, the Meet the Writers Series, and Fall Poetry Festival. For more information about the program and its offerings, email us at mfa@mville.edu.

About Connecticut Humanities 
CT Humanities (CTH) is an independent, nonprofit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. CTH connects people to the humanities through grants, partnerships, and collaborative programs. CTH projects, administration, and program development are supported by state and federal matching funds, community foundations, and gifts from private sources. Learn more by visiting cthumanities.org. 

About Connecticut Office of the Arts  

The Connecticut Office of the Arts (COA) is the state agency charged with fostering the health of Connecticut’s creative economy. Part of the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development, the COA is funded by the State of Connecticut as well as the National Endowment for the Arts.