Adil, 14, is one of hundreds born malformed or with brain damage near Union Carbide’s factory

Dear Prime Minister Manmohan Singh,

Nearly a quarter of a century after the Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, the company’s factory remains uncleaned while chemicals leaking from the site continue to poison the drinking water of tens of thousands. Children in the affected communities are being born with deformities so severe that their pictures could not be published in the media. The Union Carbide Corporation, now wholly owned by Dow Chemical, disclaims responsibility for the factory and for the last 16 years has refused to appear in the Indian court where it faces serious criminal charges. In these circumstances, we urge you and your ministers to honour your promises made two years ago in relation to proper health care and monitoring for those affected by the gas and poisoned water, to obey the Indian Supreme Court’s 2004 order to provide safe drinking water for communities whose water is poisoned and not to have business dealings with Union Carbide Corporation or its legal owners while the contempt of court continues.

Yours faithfully,

Indra Sinha, writer
John Aitken, playwright
Terry Allan, multimedia artist
Tahmima Anam, writer
aladin, performer
Meena Alexander, poet
Deepa Anappara, journalist
Michael Anderson, filmmaker
Wayne Ashton, writer
Paul Beavis, musician
John Berendt, writer
Chris Beresford, film editor
Lucy Beresford, writer
Kankana Basu, writer
Peter Bonas, musician
Kavita Bhanot, writer
David Bronze, musician
Margo Buchanan, singer/songwriter
Ken Burnett, writer
Saffron Burrows, actress
Urvashi Butalia, writer
Gabriel Byrne, actor
Paul Carrack, singer/songwriter
Sudeep Chakravarti, writer
Neel Chaudhuri, playwright
Dilip Chitre, poet
Chandrahas Choudhury, writer
Simon Clarke, musician
Matthew D’Ancona, writer
Martin Ditcham, musician
Martin Donald, musician
Libby Doughlas, producer
Anne Enright, writer
Andy Fairweather Low, musician/singer
Sonia Faleiro, writer
Neil French, writer
Pablo Ganguli, producer
Anna George, actress
Rajni George, editor
Alan Glen, musician
Vijaya Ghose, writer
Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan, writer
Andrew Goss, writer
Mike Gould, actor
Peter Griffin, writer
Niall Griffiths, writer
Mohsin Hamid, writer
Githa Hariharan, writer
Nöelle Harrison, writer
Gordon Haskell, singer/songwriter
Phil Hilborne, musician
Tim Huskisson, musician
Lloyd Jones, writer
Advaita Kala, writer
John Kalinowsky, designer
Himali Kapil, filmmaker
Sriram Karri, writer
Tabish Khair, writer
Lajwanti Khemlani writer
Sarwar Hussain Khan, musician
Pradeep Krishen, writer
Hari Kunzru, writer
Dominique Lapierre, writer
Denis Locorriere, singer
Gautam Malkani, writer
Sharanya Manivannan, writer
Sharanya Manivannan, writer
Mahesh Matthai, director
Seamus Martin, writer
Suketu Mehta, writer
Rohinton Mistry, writer
Monica Mody, poet
Amitabha Mukerjee, professor
Arka Mukhopadhyay, poet
Batul Mukhtiar, filmmaker
Andy Newmark, musician
Lisa O’Kane, singer/songwriter
Kristina Olsen, singer/songwriter
Anand Patwardhan, filmmaker
Meher Pestonji, playwright
Josh Philips, musician/composer
Mike Piggot, musician
Jerry Pinto, writer
Sunil Poolani, writer
Tim Renwick , musician/composer
Arundhati Roy, writer
Kamila Shamsie, writer
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, writer
Holger Schneider, musician
Heather Simmons, singer
Anna Sleptsova, concert pianist
Chris Stainton, musician
Alexis Stamatis, writer
Eleanor Stride, sculptor
Jeffrey & Sally Stride, painters
Rosa Stride, actress
Arundhati Subramaniam, poet
Sridala Swami, poet
Anand Thakore, singer, poet
Brian Turner, poet
Magnus Westerberg, screenwriter
Paul (Wix) Wickens, musician
X-8, painter
Annie Zaidi, writer
William Zappa, actor
Meno Zeissen, producer

The letter appeared in the UK’s Guardian newspaper on April 11, 2008. My thanks to all who joined me in signing it. Please circulate it widely via the internet, blogs and websites. If you would like to add your name to ours, please email me

Donations to the Bhopal Medical Appeal can be made at: http://www.bhopal.org/donations/

A moving message from Christine Jordis, an editor at Gallimard in Paris, about the unhappy situation in Tibet. Vickie and I met Christine at the Kitab Festival in Bombay at the end of February. English translation coming.

Tibet Support Groups worldwide
Support Free Tibet Campaign

The exhibition is on Tuesday 8th April at the Galleria, Royal Opera Arcade, Pall Mall, London

Jeff writes: “These landscapes will provide an ambience for an evening conference organised by the French Tourist Board but until then I have the place to myself.

“Sally and I would be very happy to welcome you during the afternoon and show you the new paintings or, if this is inconvenient, you could try to gatecrash the evening session. If you’d like to know more please write to me at jeff(at)jeffstride.net.

“This may well be my last London show when I won’t have to add a gallery commission to the price tag.”

Preview the paintings online here.

Animal’s People has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Europe and South Asia in the Best Book category. (GUARDIAN REPORT) Thanks to all who supported the novel, which now goes to the final in South Africa in May.

Animal, sculpture by Eleanor Stride, photographed in Vers, France. Read the Khaufpur Gazette’s interview with Animal here.

Animal’s People is a story about poor people coping with unimaginable tragedy and injustice. The book could have been set anywhere where the chemical industry has destroyed people’s lives. I had considered calling the city Receio and setting it in Brazil. It could just as easily have been set in central or south America, west Africa or the Philippines. In the end it was Khaufpur and India.

Bhopali woman at the free Sambhavna Clinic. I don’t know your name, but this prize is for you

Whether Receio or Khaufpur the background to Animal’s People is clearly based on Bhopal and I am pleased that the attention the novel has got has reminded people of the continuing double disaster in that all-too-real city – first the gas leak itself which has killed around 23,000 people directly and through lingering illness. The second disaster is the mass poisoning of the water supply of 30,000 more by chemicals leaking from the abandoned, never-cleaned factory. Babies are being born in affected communities with deformities and brain damage. The company responsible refuses to clean the factory or compensate those its chemicals are poisoning.

Injustice is itself a deadly poison: anger eats into the spirit and turns to despair and desperation. Why do we never learn this lesson? Our friends in Bhopal are dedicated to Gandhian non-violent resistance. We should not fail them.

Walking to Delhi in 2006. Now they must do it again because the Prime Minister did not keep the promises he made them last time

Leaving Agra before dawn, the 2008 march gains its first bovine member

For the second time in three years, Bhopali survivors are walking to Delhi to ask the Prime Minister to keep the promises he and his government made in 2006 and have failed to keep.They need our support, you can help by visiting bhopal.net, bhopal.org and www.studentsforbhopal.org

More than 100,000 in the city remain chronically ill. Our Sambhavna clinic has to date given free medical care to around 30,000 of them. We have had great success combining modern medicine with non-drug therapies like yoga, massage, yogic breathing and traditional Indian herbal medicine. The results are encouraging and we now want to share what we have learned with other communities around the world whose health has been destroyed by chemicals.

To all of these people, Bhopalis and others, I dedicate this Commonwealth Prize for Animal’s People.

Fink once, Fink twice, Fink bike. Yes it’s that man again. My old friend Graham Fink, nowadays creative director at M&C Saatchi, sent me this short film. Clever, clear, simple, powerful, it reminds me of what I used to enjoy most about advertising.

I met Graham back in 1984 on my first day at CDP (Collett Dickenson Pearce). It was a grey February day and Finky was walking round the creative department in a greatcoat and dark glasses. He gave me a tour of the department. “Over there’s Arthur Parsons. Then you. Next is me and Clarky, and God’s in the corner.” I thought, well of course, if God worked in an ad agency, it would have to be Colletts.

‘God’ turned out to be Neil Godfrey, at that time the most famous art director in British advertising history. Later I had the great pleasure of partnering him for seven years on campaigns for Amnesty International and the Metropolitan Police - the latter campaign having been kicked off by Graham and Jeremy Clarke before they deserted us for Saatchis.

The film is at http://youtube.com/watch?v=4xW-VAvQvSk if anyone would like to go there and give it the star rating it deserves.

Kathleen Ferrier sings Orfeo in Orfeo ed Euridice by Christoph Willibald Gluck. Sung in English with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Recorded at Kingsway Hall, London, 27 February 1946.

In February 1953, by this time seriously ill with cancer, she performed the role again at Covent Garden. The opening night was a triumph but on the second night a bone in her leg gave way. She completed the performance but left the stage on a stretcher. This opera, about the cruelty of death, was her own swansong.

Top novels in disguise rejected by publishers

JONATHAN CALVERT AND WILL IREDALE

THERE is no greater award for a writer than the Nobel prize for literature. Five years ago the accolade went to VS Naipaul in recognition of his 50-year writing career.

Naipaul, born in Trinidad, also won the 1971 Booker prize (now the Man Booker) in Britain, where he has lived since 1950. It was awarded for In a Free State, his novel about displaced colonials on different continents.

Dennis Potter, the TV dramatist, praised its “lucid complexity”. He wrote: “Do not miss the exhilaration of catching one of our most accomplished writers reaching towards the full stretch of his talent.”

Surely the special qualities of such timeless prose would be recognised by today’s publishing industry? Surely a first-time novelist who matched the standard of Naipaul at his best would be snapped up?

The Sunday Times sent out the opening chapter of In a Free State to 20 agents and publishers to find out. Only the names of the author and main characters were changed.

None of the agents or publishers spotted the book’s true pedigree. And instead of experiencing Potter’s exhilaration, they all sent back polite rejections.

Typical was the reply from PFD, a major London literary agency. “Having considered your material,” wrote a submissions department reader, “we do not feel, we are sorry to say, sufficiently enthusiastic or confident about it.”

The Blake Friedmann agency also sent its apologies: “In order to take on a new author, several of us here would need to be extremely enthusiastic about both the content and writing style. I’m sorry to say we don’t feel that strongly about your work.”

Earlier we had also submitted copies of Stanley Middleton’s 1974 joint Booker winner, Holiday, to the same agents and publishers. Middleton, well- regarded in the literary world, has produced 42 books. Ronald Blythe, the author, once wrote in The Sunday Times: “We need Stanley Middleton to remind us what the novel is all about.”

But Middleton’s Booker winner also received a less-than- enthusiastic response. Bloomsbury, the London publisher, read the book “with interest” but found it unsuited to its list. Time Warner said the manuscript contained “good ideas” but it was not its sort of book. Thirteen others gave similar replies. Only one literary agent, Barbara Levy, expressed an interest in reading further chapters.

So why were two such “great” literary works overlooked? David Taylor, the novelist and critic, thought Middleton’s novel may now be regarded as “old-fashioned” but could not explain why Naipaul’s “timeless” work was ignored.

But he was not entirely surprised. “The sort of books being rejected would really shock you,” he said.

Nicholas Clee, former editor of the Bookseller, said that publishers were no longer keen to take risks on untried authors because they faced fiercer competition as the supermarkets forced down prices. He said: “Publishers tend to go for newcomers who have something sensational to offer, or established names. They’re putting big promotional efforts behind just a few titles.”

This has led to a growth in celebrity novels. For example Katie Price, the model known as Jordan, secured a deal to write two novels with Random House earlier this year.

Today’s authors have to be marketable. Taylor said: “Being 29, blonde, good-looking and vaguely famous should be enough to get you a book published nowadays.” Although there are still middle-aged novelists who buck the trend, our rejected version of Holiday was purportedly written by a 53-year-old man.

According to Doris Lessing, the author, publishers have become less willing to nurture talent. “The whole industry has changed so much,” she said. “They used to make an effort to keep first-time novelists in print. Maybe it took till the fourth book for the writer to take off. Now, if the first novel doesn’t attract any attention, they don’t take another one.”

There has also been an explosion in the number of aspiring novelists. Many are attracted by stories of huge advances even though, according to Taylor, no more than 20 writers of literary novels earn enough to survive on without another source of income.

Most of the major publishers have stopped operating a “slush pile” — their name for unsolicited submissions. Instead the work is passed on to the literary agencies, who themselves find it difficult to read everything. Many manuscripts are discarded after a few pages.

Carole Blake, of Blake Friedmann, receives up to 50 novels a day but takes on just six new authors a year. “We have two book agents and we’re pretty full,” she said. “So unless something leaps off the page as amazingly commercial or literary, it is very unlikely we will take new clients on.”

Bloomsbury, Time Warner and PFD were unavailable for comment last week. Barbara Levy said her agency was deluged with 1,500 manuscripts a year. Patrick Janson-Smith, of the Christopher Little agency, said: “We get masses, and it would be a foolish person who pretended they read every sentence.”

Mark Lucas, of the Lucas Alexander Whitley agency, said: “We would love to claim that absolutely everything that came in got extensively cross-examined. But successful agencies have rather full client lists . . . when you guys do things like this, it’s time for us all to celebrate. It shows there isn’t an absolute scale of values and nor should there be.”

This article was first published in The Sunday Times on Jan 1, 2006

Binding: Lester Capon for ‘Animal’s People’
by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

From the V&A website:

“Designer Bookbinders, founded over fifty years ago, is one of the foremost societies devoted to the craft of fine bookbinding. By means of exhibitions and publications, it has helped to establish the reputation of British bookbinding worldwide. Its membership is drawn from the fields of fine bookbinding, book arts and artists’ books, and includes some of the most highly regarded makers, each with a passion for presenting the bound text as a unique art object.

Designer Bookbinders has been associated with the Man Booker Prize for fiction since 1991, when the Booker Prize Foundation first invited Fellows of the society to design and bind copies of the six shortlisted novels.

The six Fellows are chosen in advance, and when the shortlist is announced they are allocated one title each. The binder then has only four to five weeks to read, design and bind their book (with a container). The books must be ready in time for the night of the final prize announcement, when each bound novel is presented to its author at the famous ‘Booker dinner’. This means a very concentrated period of work with little time for rethinking, but the results are as varied as the books themselves.

Materials range from the traditional leather and gold leaf in a contemporary context, to wood, perspex, fabric and embroidery, metal and found objects”

This year’s books are on exhibition at the V&A.

Binding: Rachel Ward-Sale for ‘Darkmans’
by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)

Binding: Faith Shannon for ‘The Gathering’
by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)

Binding : Stephen Conway for ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’
by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)

Binding: Christopher Shaw for ‘Mister Pip’
by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)

Binding: Peter Jones for ‘On Chesil Beach’
by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)

An unforgettable night at the Guildhall: the memory I take away isn’t disappointment that I didn’t win but the great pleasure of getting to know my fellow nominees, all of whose books I shall be reading and reviewing on this site over the next few weeks. Meanwhile here’s the family at the reception before dinner. I wasn’t really glugging the champagne two at a time, the empty glass belongs to son Dan, who was taking the picture. During the dinner the kids went off to a restaurant but returned for the announcement and gatecrashed the main event.

Sam, Tara, Vickie, Indra, (Dan taking the pic)

Dan appraising the Man group’s champagne (photo by Sam)

We were having dinner with some friends who’d just driven up from Spain, ten of us round the table, when the phone rang. It was another friend demanding that we switch on the BBC. ‘Sir Howard Davies is on Radio Four and you’ve been longlisted for the Booker.’

The news sounded extremely unlikely. I knew Animal’s People had been entered, but had since forgotten all about it.

‘He definitely mentioned your book,’ my friend insisted.

I returned to the table and as calmly as I could told the others. Let’s not get too excited, he’s probably got it all wrong. A quarter of an hour later the phone rang again and this time it was my sister Umi who is never wrong.

It was rather wonderful news because Animal’s People had a disappointing start. One review in the UK, a couple in India. As time went by it became clear that there weren’t going to be any more. No one had heard of the book, friends couldn’t find it in the shops, Indian booksellers denied all knowledge of it. It was set to vanish without trace, a fate that overtakes so many novels. On Amazon it was ranked somewhere around 220,000. Once, when a kind friend bought six copies, it jumped 200,000 places.

The British review was from Lucy Beresford to whom I shall always be grateful. It appeared in the New Statesman which in the 1950s under the editorship of John Freeman had published a number of my mother’s short stories. When I was a student at Cambridge I dug out the old issues in the University Library and discovered that another of John Freeman’s up-and-coming young writers was one Doris Lessing.

The immediate effect of being longlisted was that people started talking about the book. From India, where previously it had been impossible to drum up any interest, came a stream of telephone calls wanting interviews. Some sent questionnaires they demanded back by return. I gratefully obliged. Anything to gain the novel a chance of being read.

At the Edinburgh Book Festival my reading was sold out, a welcome change from last time when I do believe it was festival staff gallantly making up most of the audience of ten. I apologised to the audience for the foulness of Animal, the narrator’s, language, but someone said to me later that they thought I was more shocked by it than anyone else.

Afterwards there was a long queue of people wanting signed copies. One man bought eighteen and when I asked what on earth he wanted with so many, replied candidly that he planned to sell them on eBay. ‘But I’ve paid full price,’ he said. I think this is when it sank in that something big had happened.

‘The attention will only last four weeks,’ my agent warned. As they passed, the pleasure of being longlisted slowly turned into apprehension about the shortlist.

I was invited to the shortlist party but didn’t want to go and flew over from Toulouse in a cloud of butterflies, despatched by my wife with instructions that ‘your smile must be warm and genuine whatever happens’. Spent the afternoon in my hotel room trying to doze, not daring to turn on the TV or radio, dreading the phone. Three thirty came and went and it didn’t ring. Obviously not good news. I logged onto the Booker website and was much relieved.

The drinks do was at the Century Club in Shaftesbury Avenue. I met three of the other writers. Nicola Barker was nice and down to earth, Mohsin Hamid was friendly (we have a mutual friend in Suketu Mehta, who wrote Maximum City) and we decided that we must stand together in the face of media reports that ‘Indo-Pak rivalries enter literary arena’. Lloyd Jones seemed a little reserved, but possibly with good reason, as I may have been pretty well oiled by that point. The stress, you know.

The Times reported that Animal’s People was one of only three longlisters whose Amazon ranking had climbed further from the peak reached after the longlist announcement, while The Telegraph reported that in the first ten days of being longlisted it had sold just 231 copies. If this seems contradictory, friends had initially reported not being able to find the book in any shop, and for much of the first ten days Amazon was out of stock, quoting a delivery date of between 4-6 weeks.

Animal’s People is the rank outsider to win the prize, but I am clear that I have been very lucky and glad that Animal, who has made so much of my past five years a pleasure and a nightmare, will now have his say.

PUBLISHED IN THE NEW STATESMAN UNDER THE TITLE ‘SURPRISE PARTY’