Amit Chaudhuri’s Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music wins the biography prize in the James Tait Black Prizes

By turns essay, memoir and cultural study, Finding the Raga is Amit Chaudhuri’s singular account of his discovery of, and enduring passion for, North Indian music: an ancient, evolving tradition whose principles and practices will alter the reader’s notion of what music might – and can – be.

Tracing the music’s development, Finding the Raga dwells on its most distinctive and mysterious characteristics: its extraordinary approach to time, language and silence; its embrace of confoundment, and its ethos of evocation over representation. The result is a strange gift of a book, for musicians and music lovers, and for any creative mind in search of diverse and transforming inspiration.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of seven novels, including, most recently, Friend of My Youth, as well as a work of non-fiction, Calcutta, and collections of short stories, poetry, essays, and a critical study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry. He has received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Encore Prize, the LA Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Chaudhuri is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia and Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University. Alongside this, he is an admired singer in the North Indian classical tradition and a composer and performer in a celebrated project that brings together the raga, blues and jazz with a variety of other musical traditions. He received the Sangeet Samman from the government of West Bengal. Chaudhuri is regularly featured on radio and TV; his version of ‘Summertime’ was featured on the BBC 4 documentary, Gershwin’s Summertime: the Song that Conquered the World.