Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, academic and musician whose books include A New World, The Immortals and most recently Odysseus Abroad.
----more----His talent for close observation of everyday details, events and characters have earned him comparison to Proust, though Chaudhuri tends to work on rather smaller canvasses.
We met in an extremely noisy cafe in Oxford, and began by discussing Chaudhuri's own time as a postgraduate student in the city over two decades earlier. In the same way that this period inspired his second novel, Afternoon Raag, Chaudhuri's arrival in London and undergraduate degree in English at University College is the basis for Odysseus Abroad. As well as describing an early love of poetry, the novel traces through its allusive form a love of Homer and James Joyce. In the first part of our conversation, we also talked about: