Author Description

Conversations in Bloomsbury occupies a distinct place in Mulk Raj Anand\\'s writings. Outside of his fiction it is the most significance of his works and, along with Apology for Heroism, is the key to understanding Anand\\'s literary, social and political beliefs. Living in London from 1925 to 1945, Anand came to know the prominent writes and intellectuals of the metropolis, many of whom belonged to what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. In twenty engrossing chapters, he recalls his wide-ranging conversations with E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, C.E.M. Joad, T.S. Eliot and several others. The four chapters on the enigmatic T.S. Eliot are the highlight of the book. They offer a penetrating and sympathetic understanding of Eliot\\'s mind and reveal Anand\\'s capacity not to allow his own personal view of the man to cloud his admiration for the poet's literary achievements. In the imaginative rendering of his actual conversations, Anand has faithfully, often evocatively, captured the literary, cultural and political climate of the England of the 1920s and 1930s. The book reveals both Anand\\'s ambivalence towards the Bloomsbury Group as well as ambivalent attitude of the British literati towards India\\'s freedom. Together, the chapters metamorphose into a long autobiographical essay about the writer discovering his convictions and his nationalistic roots in a foreign land. Saros Cowasjee is Professor Emeritus of the University of Regina in Canada. His writings include the novels Goodbye to Elsa (1974) and My Dear Maura (2005), critical studies on Sean O\\'Casey and Mulk Raj Anand, and several anthologies of fiction. The latter include The Oxford Anthology of Rai Stories (2004) and The Mulk Raj Anand Omnibus (2004). His latest is a collection of his own short fiction entitled Strange Meeting and Other Stories (2006).