Anita Rau Badami

Anita Rau Badami talks with Pamela about travelling by train through India, witnessing the violence that followed the assassination of Indira Ghani, and how her visual art intersects with her writing.

Anita moved to Calgary in 1991 when her husband was pursuing a Master’s degree at the university. Already a journalist, she enrolled in a creative writing program and began the manuscript for the novel that became Tamarind Mem. Four years later she published her second novel, The Hero’s Walk, which was a regional winner for the Commonwealth Prize, long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and a contender for Canada Reads. Can you Hear the Nightbird Call and Tell it to the Trees were the two books that followed when she moved to Montreal.

Anita’s writing was recognized by the Writers’ Trust when she won the Marian Engel Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize administrators when she was asked to chair the jury in 2017. Listen to our delightful conversation here.