At the Author’s Afternoon with Sanjay Chopra

Saturday, 23 March, 2013: Yesterday another of the series of Author’s Afternoon, infact the seventh in the series, was held at the Taj Bengal. This time our guest was Sanjay Chopra, the author of Talespin – a collection of short stories.

Sanjay is a pilot with an international airline and has been flying for the past eighteen years. This had given him the opportunity to explore his interest in the history of various cultures and lands. He spent much of his childhood with his grandfather who was an avid reader and a brilliant storyteller, the qualities that Sanjay inherited and developed from his formative years of life. What particularly caught his fancy were the “gaps” or missing links in history, the unknown or lesser known details, that became the source of his fiction and the collection of short stories the he has penned over the years and kept his readers’ interest piqued. A course at the London School of Journalism helped him to hone his craft.

Of the stories that feature in this collection, Turache won the Invisibe Ink and the Sunpenny publishing contests in the UK. A Fate Worse Than was on the winners’ lists of the Creative Writers’ competition and Southport Writers’ Circle. Men of the Horse was on the highly recommended list of The Millennium Writers and Fish Publishing awards. The Contractor was awarded a prize at the Blood Ink Crime Writing Competition and the entire collection of short stories was in the top five of the Alexander Patterson Cappon Prize for fiction. Tisca, his actress wife, was in conversation with him. I had met Tisca for the first time during Mountain Echoes Literary Festival in Bhutan.

Yesterday’s Author’s Afternoon had two new features, it is the first time we had an author whose book was based on short stories and also the first time a husband and wife were on the dais in conversation. In the evening hosted a dinner for Sanjay and Tisca Chopra with a few friends at my home.
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