Annie Zaidi
Life
Annie Zaidi was born in 1978 to a Muslim mother and a Hindu father in Allahabad in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Since November 2018 Allahabad has been called Prayagraj — which already places us right in the midst of the life and central themes of this versatile and gifted woman.
Her family comes from the small town of Muhammadabad Gohna, Mau district, Uttar Pradesh. This district is predominantly rural and has a notably high proportion of members of the Scheduled Castes (Dalits, or the "casteless"). She spent part of her childhood in the dust and heat near the large cement factory of the town of JKPuram in Rajasthan, where her mother worked as a teacher for the factory workers' children in order to stand on her own feet after her marriage failed.
Afterwards, too, she lived in many other places (Delhi, Lucknow, Mumbai) — always on the move, always searching for a sense of belonging, always with the feeling of being perceived as a foreign body (a Muslim woman, an outsider). In her 2020 book Bread Cement Cactus – A Memoir of Belonging and Dislocation, a combination of autobiography and reportage, she analysed this feeling while at the same time abstracting from her own person, i.e. generalising it in a certain sense. This book, whose initially puzzling title becomes clear once one has read the first few pages, Annie Zaidi was able to write as the winner of the richly endowed 2019 "Nine Dots Prize" for her essay on the prize question "Is home truly best?". Alongside her literary work and her role as a columnist for the newspaper The Hindu, Annie Zaidi currently teaches as Associate Professor of Journalism at the Jindal School of Journalism and Communication (JSJC) in Sonipat (Haryana).
Work
Against this biographical background, Annie Zaidi's journalistic, poetic, dramatic and literary output — from her 2007 poetry collection Crush to her first novel Prelude to a Riot in 2019 and the memoir Bread Cement Cactus — revolves around the themes of migration and uprooting, poverty and discrimination, misogyny, and the Hindu-Muslim conflict that has repeatedly flared up, and has often been deliberately stoked, since the partition of the country in 1947.
As far-ranging as Annie Zaidi's thematic interests are, her handling of the most diverse forms of expression is equally virtuosic and versatile. As a trained journalist she naturally masters the genre of reportage or ethnographic description; as a playwright and director of short films she also moves confidently in that field; and as a novelist — as Prelude to a Riot shows — she can give the genre new impulses by mixing these different styles (poem, drama, prose, newspaper article): Prelude to a Riot is not a linear narrative but, like a play, first introduces the dramatis personae at the outset and lets them explain their view of events in their own monologues.
At barely thirty years of age, Annie Zaidi began to make a name for herself, consolidating it in the following years through outstanding, prize-winning works.
Gerhard Bierwirth
Own Works (Selection)
- Crush, 2007 (illustrated poetry collection)
- Name, Place, Animal, Thing, 2009 (play)
- Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and other True Tales, 2010 (reportage, travel writing, autobiographical essays on subjects such as religious conflict, female foeticide/infanticide, caste conflicts, and similar topics)
- Gulab Love Stories #1 to 14, 2012 (short stories)
- Untitled-1, 2018 (play)
- Prelude to a Riot, 2019 (novel)
- Bread Cement Cactus, 2020 (see above)
As Editor
- Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women's Writing, 2015 (anthology of well-known and lesser-known Indian women writers of poetry, essays, stories and memoirs)
Published in German
- Anstiftung zum Mord (Prelude to a Riot), novel, Draupadi Verlag, 2020 (in German)
Awards
- Prakriti Prize for Poetry 2010 for her contribution to the Chennai Poetry with Prakriti festival
- Hindu Playwright Award 2018 for the play Untitled
- Tata Live Fiction Book Prize 2020 for Prelude to a Riot
- Nine Dots Prize 2019 for Bread Cement Cactus (ninedotsprize.org)
Excerpts
Web Links
Reviews
- Review of Prelude to a Riot by Devapriya Roy, Deccan Chronicle, 22 December 2019
- Review of Anstiftung zum Mord by Claudia Kramatschek, NZZ, 8 January 2021 (in German)
Interviews
- Interview with Qudsiya Ahmad, 22 May 2020
- Interview with Anna Georgia Mackay, Griffith Review No. 49
- Interview with Namrata Kolachalam, 17 February 2020
Blog
- Annie Zaidi's own blog, where she comments on various topics