Settle in for an extra special episode of the Boundless Book Club as Ahlam and Annabelle chat to one of the six incredible authors shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize for Fiction…which is essentially the Oscars for literature! Dubai-based novelist Avni Doshi joins us for an in-depth conversation about her debut, Burnt Sugar, a captivating story of a fraught mother-daughter relationship tested by dementia and painful memories set in contemporary India. From how her own mother reacted to the book’s publication, to the near hallucinatory experience of being nominated for the prize, sit back and enjoy Avni’s relentless wisdom on the themes of memory, motherhood, and more.

About the Author:

Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey in  1982 and is currently based in Dubai. She won the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize in 2013 and a Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in 2014. Her debut novel is published in India by Fourth Estate under the title Girl in White Cotton.

About the Booker Prize:

The Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for more than five decades. Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. It is a prize that transforms the winner’s career.

The winner receives £50,000 as well as the £2,500 awarded to each of the six shortlisted authors. Both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a global readership plus a dramatic increase in book sales.

About us:

Ahlam Bolooki is the Festival Director for the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, the largest celebration of the written and spoken word in the Arab World. Ahlam finds it difficult to choose a favourite genre as it’s always changing and she’s still in the midst of discovering her literary self. She’s catching up on all the gems she missed as a child such as The Little Prince and The Giving Tree, but has also developed a new appetite for Crime Fiction so who knows what’s next?

Andrea Gissdal is the Head of Communications and Marketing for the Emirates Literature Foundation. From a voracious and indiscriminate reader as a child, to a part time bookseller as a student, as an adult she has become a literary omnivore but with a preference for fiction. She also dabbles in creative writing, and has a penchant for Scrabble.

Annabelle Corton is part of the team that puts together the programme of events for the EmiratesLitFest each year. She runs the Festival Book Club and has a background in guesting and presenting on talk radio shows about various literary topics. She likes words like ‘equinox’ and ‘vespa’, and loves a good pun. She’ll read anything in reach, but has a fondness for witty tussles of good vs. evil on page and screen, especially vampire fiction where a great deal is at stake. Get it? Stake? ….She’s not sorry.