Creative Journeys 10: Benyamin

Toto Funds the Arts

and the

British Council Library, Bangalore 

are delighted to invite you to the tenth edition of the series

Creative Journeys

Award-winning Malayalam author 

Benyamin

will be in conversation with CK Meena & Nithin Manayath

Date: Saturday, 27 July 2019

  Time: 6.30 p.m.

Venue: The British Council Library, Prestige Takt, 23, Kasturba Road Cross 

(Opposite Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum), 

 Bangalore 560 001

Extracts from his novels (in English and Malayalam) will be read 

by the Bangalore actors Vivek Vijayakumaran & Abhitej Gupta

BENYAMIN says it was destiny, not fate, that turned him into a writer. Born Benny Daniel in 1971 to a taxi-driver father and housewife mother, he was working as a maintenance engineer in a bank in Bahrain when he plunged into the world of literature. Of his 20-odd novels, short story anthologies and works of non-fiction, his novel Aadujeevitham, which portrays the life of an Indian labourer in Saudi Arabia, won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award in 2009. Translated into English as Goat Days, it was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012 and shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2013. He won the inaugural JCB Prize for Literature in 2018 for Jasmine Days, translated from his 2014 novel Mullapoo Niramulla Pakalukal, which describes the lives of foreign workers in an unnamed Middle Eastern country on the brink of a revolution. 

C.K. Meena is a freelance writer, author and journalism teacher.

Nithin Manayath teaches in the Communications Department of Mount Carmel College Autonomous.

About Goat Days: "Chilling account of extreme subjugation of body and mind … one of the most gripping books you’ll read."  Shreekumar Varma, The Hindu

"Very seldom in life does a book like Goat Days come along and ruin you for other books . . . You have read it and now other books just don’t compare."  Sheheryar Sheikh, Dawn

About Jasmine Days: "Benyamin’s craft of conversation-driven storytelling succeeds in revealing the tensions in a society starting to unravel."  Faizal Khan, Financial Express 

Previous speakers in TFA’S Creative Journeys Series have been Gieve Patel, Sunil Shanbag, Surupa Sen, Jitish Kallat, Sampurna Chattarji, Susmit Sen, Neel Choudhary and the Tadpole Repertory, Jayant Kaikini and MD Pallavi.

This Series provides a platform for both younger and more experienced writers, filmmakers, performing artists and visual artists to speak about the influences, impulses, processes and thinking that have shaped the art they produce