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Nilanjana Roy

Life & Arts Columnist

Nilanjana Roy joined the Weekend FT as a columnist in July with a brief to write about life, literature, ideas and much more. She is the author of a fantasy duology, The Hundred Names of Darkness, and a collection of essays on reading, The Girl Who Ate Books. She has edited two anthologies, on Indian food writing and on Indian patriots, poets and prisoners, and has been a columnist for the Business Standard

@nilanjanaroy (link opens in a new browser window)
@nilanjanaroy (link opens in a new browser window)

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  • Wednesday, 5 February, 2020
    Books
    Books to reach for in troubled times

    Can reading build resilience to adversity?

  • Friday, 24 January, 2020
    Books
    Lee Child’s retirement is good news for Jack Reacher fans

    A change of authorship grants the character the gift of immortality

  • Friday, 17 January, 2020
    ReviewFiction
    The Doll by Ismail Kadare — a mesmerising autobiographical novel

    The Albanian novelist weaves the life of his mother with his country’s tumultuous past

  • Friday, 10 January, 2020
    Books
    Protest and the pavement library

    It never fails to move me that creating a library seems to be a primal instinct among movements

  • Thursday, 2 January, 2020
    ObituaryBooks
    Sonny Mehta, head of Knopf, 1942-2019

    Flamboyant editor who transformed the lives of some of the world’s greatest authors

  • Friday, 20 December, 2019
    Indian politics & policy
    Democracy in India is on the brink

    Narendra Modi wants to replace the secular state with a ‘Hindu nation’

  • Friday, 20 December, 2019
    ReviewFiction
    Suncatcher by Romesh Gunesekera — a tale of innocence

    A friendship between two very different boys in a lost Ceylon makes a beautiful coming-of-age novel

  • Friday, 13 December, 2019
    Books
    The Godfather or The Hogfather? The perils of book giving

    The horse’s head! The sex! The murders! — How a spectacular failure cost me a friendship

  • Friday, 29 November, 2019
    Books
    Want to build democracy? Then build libraries

    Populists are starving public libraries of funds, while India’s rightwing BJP is building ‘party libraries’ for its members

  • Promoted Content
  • Monday, 25 November, 2019
    AnalysisIndian business & finance
    Whistleblowers put India’s Infosys on the spot

    Outsourcing company hit by simmering discontent over succession and direction

  • Friday, 8 November, 2019
    Fiction
    When a sequel goes in two different directions

    Perumal Murugan’s diverging sequels to ‘One Part Woman’ offer strikingly different paths for the same story

  • Friday, 25 October, 2019
    Political books
    Why Ismail Kadare was my accidental peacemaker

    ‘In his novels, people find their freedoms in small moments, even when bound by unjust laws’

  • Friday, 4 October, 2019
    Science fiction books
    End of the world? At least we have The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

    Douglas Adams’s sci-fi classic is 40 this year — let’s hope we make it to 42

  • Friday, 20 September, 2019
    Life & Arts8 min
    Brexit, populism and climate change - FT weekend festival 2019

    Leading writers including Simon Schama, Alastair Campbell, Janine Gibson and Lionel Barber reflect on our times

  • Friday, 20 September, 2019
    Fiction
    In praise of the never-ending sentence

    Long sentences are tricky to pull off — but can be a shortcut to getting inside a character

  • Friday, 30 August, 2019
    Books
    The secret gift hidden in Salman Rushdie’s books

    ‘I read Midnight’s Children in my teens, but years passed before I understood why I’d found it so liberating’

  • Friday, 23 August, 2019
    ReviewFiction
    The Far Field — ignorance is bliss

    In Madhuri Vijay’s Kashmir-set novel, innocent recklessness comes at a high price for the protagonist’s hosts

  • Friday, 9 August, 2019
    Books
    Of mousse and men: the lighter side of John Steinbeck

    Rediscovered Paris stories reveal the writer’s gentle comic touch

  • Friday, 2 August, 2019
    ReviewFiction
    Home Remedies — stories of urgency and understanding

    Xuan Juliana Wang homes in on the yearnings of China’s immigrants and millennials

  • Friday, 26 July, 2019
    Books
    Shelley was right: Let poets protest

    Miya poets challenge prejudice against Bengali-origin Muslim migrants in the Indian state of Assam

  • Friday, 19 July, 2019
    ReviewFiction
    Orange World by Karen Russell — surreal tales that hold some comfort

    Karen Russell’s freakishly imaginative worlds feel as real, as mundanely domestic, as our own everyday lives

  • Friday, 12 July, 2019
    Books
    Empire in the eyes of a cad — the lessons of Flashman

    The flaws of Rule Britannia thrown into sharp relief by rakish and cowardly British soldier

  • Friday, 5 July, 2019
    ReviewFiction
    City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert — the pleasure seekers

    A delightful story of a life well misspent in 1940s New York

  • Friday, 28 June, 2019
    Books
    Why adults abandon more books than children

    Like younger readers, we should stick to our own tastes when choosing what to read

  • Friday, 7 June, 2019
    Life & Arts
    When novels sound the alarm bells

    Today more than ever, we should salute the prescience of two works from the 1930s

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