Suniti NamjoshiFRSL (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]
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]
"Subversive Fabulations: The Twofold Pull in Suniti Namjoshi's Feminist Fables" by Sabine Steinisch in Engendering Realism and Postmodernism: Contemporary Women Writers in Britain, ed. Beate Neumeier (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2001)
"Tropes of Transition: Words, Memory and the Immigrant Experience" by Michelle Gadpaille in Canadiana: Canada in the Sign of Migration and Trans-Culturalism, eds. Kalus-Dieter Ertler and Martin Löschnigg (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, Europäishcer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2004)