Vikram Seth

Piers Wenger, the BBC’s head of drama has called it “a deliberate gamble” to adapt a drama with no white characters.

"This is the true and natural good/To undo justice, and to seek/To quash the rights that serve the weak". The poet responds to the Supreme Court's refusal to review its verdict criminalising gay sex.

'It is election time. Everyone knows the truth...the government knuckled under and enforced this disgrace because of power and politics and the misuse of religion'

We, concerned Indian citizens, support the overturning of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial-era law dating to 1861, which punitively criminalizes romantic love and private, consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex.

Mike Collett-White writing for Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - Indian poet and novelist Vikram Seth is writing a sequel to his acclaimed, monumental story "A Suitable Boy" to be titled "A Suitable Girl."

Penguin imprint Hamish Hamilton bought the English language rights to the new novel, excluding the United States, from Seth's agent David Godwin, and expects it to be published in 2013, 20 years after the original book.

Asked why he was returning to his best-known work, which sold more than a million copies in its UK paperback edition despite being more than 1,300 pages long, he replied:

"I think it's just that I suddenly got the idea not of taking up the story in 1952 where I had left it, but rather to take it up in the present.

"In other words, not just a sequel but to write what you could call a jump sequel," he told Reuters in an interview.

More here

Incidentally, Vikram Seth had come out prominently to "support the overturning of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial-era law dating to 1861, which punitively criminalizes romantic love and private, consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex"

Also See:  "It Took Me Long To Come To Terms With Myself. Those Were Painful Years."

Post Script: It’s wonderfully good, humane, says Vikram Seth

Ian Jack, while making a perfectly valid point in the Telegraph about how the method of choosing Oxford’s Professor of Poetry needs a radical rethink, tells this delightful story:

... I made the mistake of publishing a 13-word poem by Vikram Seth called “Sampati”, about the eponymous character in the Ramayana who, like Icarus, flies too near the sun. We added this information in an epigraph and footnote to the poem, without telling the poet, and Vikram was so furious that he made us publish the poem again in a later edition minus its informative dressing. This took up more space than you might think for a thirteen-word poem, because every word had a line to itself apart from “un-done”, which took up two.

We were only trying to help the ignorant reader, but we were definitely in the wrong. After all, how many footnotes does T.S. Eliot have? (Not enough.) 

It is just for these sort of things that I have always liked Vikram Seth. Now I like him even more.  As for the headline and the contents of this post, well, maybe you do need to read more about the poets Walcott and Padel and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

As Random House and Harper battle over Yuvi, a gawky Vikram Seth stars in the Absolut vodka ad.

Vikram Seth’s new book, a form-defying marvel, is shaped out of his life’s ephemera

The author, whose sequel to his popular novel has got him a record advance, reportedly around Rs 14 crore, on almost everything under the sun but the actual writing

If there's one thing Vikram Seth loathes more than crusades, it must be prying personal questions. And yet here he is not only laying bare his bisexual heart and soul but also leading a high-profile signature campaign to get rid of the infamous Secti

The 'kind but fairly reticent' writer opened up a bit at the suggestion that his mother/muse/mentor ex-Justice Leila Seth be included, making it a three-way conversation...

Vikram Seth is versatility itself, whether he's doing verse, prose, or Chinese calligraphy