Indian writer (born 1941)
Suniti Namjoshi
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| Born | 1941 (age 82–83)
Mumbai, India |
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| Occupation | Poet, author, educator |
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| Nationality | Indian-born English |
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| Education | |
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| Notable work | Feminist Fables |
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Suniti Namjoshi FRSL (born 1941 in Mumbai, India) is a poet and a fabulist. She grew up in India, worked in Canada and at present lives in the southwest of England with English writer Gillian Hanscombe. Her work is playful, inventive and often challenges prejudices such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. She has written many collections of fables and poetry, several novels, and more than a dozen children's books. Her work has been translated into several languages, including Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Hindi and Turkish.
Early life
Suniti Namjoshi was born in Mumbai in 1941.[1] Her father, Manohar Vinayak Namjoshi, was senior test pilot at Hindustan Aircraft in Bangalore. He was killed when his plane crashed in 1953. Her mother, Sarojini Namjoshi, née Naik Nimbalkar, was from Phaltan.[2]
Suniti was sent to Woodstock, an American mission school in the Himalayan foothills,[2] and then to Rishi Valley in Andhra Pradesh[3] where Jiddu Krishnamurti used to come and talk to the children for a couple of months each year.[2]
Career
Having passed the IAS in 1964, she worked as an officer in the Indian Administrative Service before pursuing further education. She studied Public Administration[3] and earned her Master's degree from the University of Missouri and earned a PhD from McGill University on Ezra Pound.[3]
Namjoshi taught in the Department of English at the University of Toronto from 1972 to 1987.[2] She wrote Feminist Fables in 1981. It was described in Feminism, one of her voices as a minor feminist classic and the work for which Namjoshi, who the article said produced a "brilliant body of work, marked by sparkling wit, word play and inventive power, emerged", is best known.[3] She began writing full-time in 1987, publishing fiction and poetry works. Kaliyug - Circles Of Paradise (play) and Flesh And Paper (poetry) were written in collaboration Gillian Hanscombe.[3] Namjoshi has been influenced by Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, her friend Hilary Clare, and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. She has been active in the feminist movement and gay liberation movements.[1]
Namjoshi was Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Women's Studies at Exeter University in England from 1995 to 2001, and was a member of the Literary Panel of the Arts Council of England from 1993 to 1996.[2]
In 1996 Namjoshi published Building Babel, a postmodern novel about building cultures, whose story continues online with a collaborative project that enables readers' contributions.[3][4]
In 2023 Namjoshi was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[5]
Namjoshi currently lives and writes in Devon, United Kingdom.[3]
