The Blue | Anukrti Upadhyay and Anu Singh Chaudhury in conversation with Udayan Mitra

The Blue
Anukrti Upadhyay and Anu Singh Chaudhury in conversation with Udayan Mitra
Mysterious as the sky and deep as the ocean, this is a session about short stories clustered around the idea of “blue”. Anukrti Upadhyay in The Blue Women imagines surreal situations about people who have unusual experiences with animate and inanimate beings; Anu Singh Chaudhury’s The Blue Scarf, translated from Hindi by Kamayani Sharma, unlocks secrets of today’s complicated relationships. Vignettes of urban life and its contrast with old-world values, new ways of understanding the body and expressing its desires, feminism that is confident, not strident -these are some of the themes that speak through the sharp and remarkable tales. In conversation with Udayan Mitra, the two writers discuss their work and the sophistication that the short story form has acquired in Indian languages while giving us a glimpse of contemporary and small-town India.
Anukrti Upadhyay writes fiction and poetry in both English and Hindi. Her English works, twin novellas Daura and Bhaunri, and novel Kintsugi, have been published by the 4th Estate imprint of Harpercollins in India and have been nominated for multiple awards. She has been awarded the Sushila Devi Award for the best work of fiction written by a woman author in 2020 for Kintsugi. Her Hindi works including a short story collection, Japani Sarai, and the novel Neena Aunty, have been published by Rajpal and Sons. Upadhyay's writings have appeared in Scroll.in, Kitaab.sg, The Bombay Review, The Bangalore Review, The Bilingual Window, and several other Hindi publications.
Anu Singh Choudhary, a celebrated author in Hindi and screenwriter. She has written extensively across print, radio, TV, films, and digital. As a screenwriter, Choudhary has co-written ‘Aarya’, and 'Grahan', among others. She has written the Hindi adaptation of the Malayalam masterpiece, The Great Indian Kitchen, and has adapted two Bengali films into Hindi. As the co-founder of Dopamine Media, she has written and directed 'The Good Girl Show', a 5-part series for KZbin, and has co-produced 'Alma Matters: Inside the IIT Dream', a 3-part docu-series now streaming on Netflix. Her books Neela Scarf, Mamma Ki Diary, and Bhali Ladkiyaan, Buri Ladkiyaan, are all considered bestsellers. Choudhary has translated well-known authors such as Perumal Murugan, Namita Gokhale, Paulo Coelho, Vir Sanghvi, and Anuja Chauhan into Hindi. She has been awarded Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism and Laadli Media and Advertising Awards.