British Council, Bangalore invites you to a literary evening with Commonwealth prize nominated author and 6- times Pushcart prize nominee MURZBAN F. SHROFF
The author will discuss his latest novel Waiting for Jonathan Koshy with Sumeet Shetty, President of Literati, India’s largest corporate book club.
RSVP – Vani Shivakumar at vani.shivakumar@in.britishcouncil.org or call us on 0120-4569000/6684353
About the Author
Murzban F. Shroff is a Mumbai-based writer. He spent 16 years in advertising, at multinational ad agencies like Ogilvy & Mather, McCann Erickson, and Grey Advertising, where he helped build some of the country’s most reputed brands. After that, Shroff started his own creative consultancy, which grew so fast that he felt he was turning into some kind of an unnatural growth machine. He, therefore, returned to his first love – writing - and worked on the nuts and bolts of it for six years. In 2008, Shroff published his first book, a collection of short stories, Breathless in Bombay, with St. Martin’s Press, U.S. The book was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the best debut category from Europe and South Asia and was rated by the Guardian as among the ten best Mumbai books.
To date, Shroff has published his fiction with over fifty literary journals in the U.S. and UK. Journals like The Gettysburg Review, The Minnesota Review, The South Carolina Review, World Literature Today, The Saturday Evening Post and Chicago Tribune. He is the recipient of the John Gilgun Fiction Award and has six Pushcart Prize nominations, the highest award for the short story in the U.S.
In 2015, Shroff represented Mumbai at the London Short Story Festival. Later that year, he was invited to speak about his work at UCLA, California State University Monterey Bay and Berkeley. In December 2015, Shroff launched his novel, Waiting For Jonathan Koshy, the second part in his Mumbai trilogy. The novel was a finalist for the Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize and has received praise from two top-drawer American writers: the Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler and the New York Times Book Reviewer Madison Smartt Bell. Shroff is currently at work on the third part of his Mumbai trilogy and a larger-than-life India collection.
International Praise for Waiting for Jonathan Koshy
“What a delicious irony sits at the heart of Murzban F. Shroff’s Waiting for Jonathan Koshy: the central character is almost larger than life, having done the things we all might dream of doing to serve others in desperate situations; but in his own life, for his own welfare, he is, in many ways powerless. By magnifying the heroic, Shroff unflinchingly portrays our human vulnerability. Waiting for Jonathan Koshy is a fascinating reading experience from a deeply skilled writer.”— Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize Winner
“Waiting for Jonathan Koshy is a splendid portrait of its quixotically hard-hustling hero. Murzban Shroff’s kaleidoscopic image of Koshy’s passage through the complications of his journey offers a remarkably frank and revealing view of twenty-first century Indian life.”— Madison Smartt Bell, National Book Award Finalist