The Betty Trask Award is given to a first novel written by authors under the age of 35 who reside in a current or former Commonwealth nation. The award was established in 1984 by the Society of Authors at the behest of Betty Trask, a reclusive author of 30 romantic novels.
Joseph's novel narrates the story of Swarasati Park, a housing complex in a suburb somewhere deep in the heart of Mumbai and two of its empty-nesters, Mohan and Laxmi Karekar, whose lives are humdrum.
While Laxmi is a homemaker, Mohan is a letter-writer -- one of those quaint jobs which is non-existent today. From his seat under some tarpaulin near the main post-office, he sits and writes letters for those who are illiterate, anything from heartfelt letters to bureaucratic forms.
Anjali Joseph was born in Bombay in 1978. She read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has taught English at the Sorbonne, written for the Times of India in Bombay and been a Commissioning Editor for ELLE (India). She graduated from the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2008, and lives in London and Bombay. Saraswati Park is her first novel.
Book Summary of Saraswati Park
A tremendous first novel from an exciting young author. Feted for its electric chaos, the city of Bombay also accommodates pockets of calm. In one such enclave, Mohan, a middle-aged letter writer - the last of a dying profession - sits under a banyan tree in Fort, furnishing missives for village migrants, disenchanted lovers, and when pickings are slim, filling in money order forms. But Mohan\'s true passion is collecting second-hand books; he\'s particularly attached to novels with marginal annotations. So when the pavement booksellers of Fort are summarily evicted, Mohan\'s life starts to lose some of its animating lustre. At this tenuous moment Mohan - and his wife, Lakshmi - are joined in Saraswati Park, a suburban housing colony, by their nephew, Ashish, a diffident, sexually uncertain 19-year-old who has to repeat his final year in college. Elliptical and enigmatic, but beautifully rendered and wonderfully involving, Saraswati Park is a book about love and loss and the noise in our heads - and how, in spite of everything, life, both lived and imagined, continues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Trask_Award