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THIRD ANNUAL IAAC LITERARY FESTIVAL
NYU KIMMEL CENTER, 60 WASHINGTON SQUARE SOUTH, NYC
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| OCTOBER 7-9, 2016 |
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| Sunday October 9, 2016.
12:15 pm - 1:15 pm |
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Session 2A
Swimmer Among the Stars: The Trio of Tharoors |
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Kanishk Tharoor, Ishaan Tharoor in conversation with Shashi Tharoor
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| Veteran author, diplomat and politician Shashi Tharoor will engage his twin sons Ishaan Tharoor and Kanishk Tharoor in a discussion about their journalistic and literary engagement with the world. Ishaan is a foreign affairs writer for the Washington Post, while Kanishk's debut work of fiction, Swimmer Among the Stars, will be published in the United States in March 2017. |
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| Kanishk Tharoor |
 Kanishk Tharoor is a writer and broadcaster. His debut collection, Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories, was published by Aleph Book Company in India in January 2016, and is forthcoming from Picador in the UK and Commonwealth and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in North America in spring 2017. His short fiction has won numerous prizes and been nominated for the National Magazine Award. He is currently at work on a novel.
He is the presenter of "Museum of Lost Objects," a ten-part BBC radio series on cultural destruction in Iraq and Syria on BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service in 2016.
His pieces on politics and culture have appeared in publications around the world, including the New York Times, Guardian, The National, The Hindu, Caravan, newyorker.com, Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera America, Roads & Kingdoms, Foreign Policy, Cairo Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Guernica
He studied at Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude and phi beta kappa with BAs in History and Literature, and at Columbia, where he was a FLAS fellow in Persian and South Asian studies. He was a “Writer in Public Schools” fellow at New York University. |
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| Swimmer among the Stars |
 An interview with the last speaker of a language. A chronicle of the final seven days of a town that is about to be razed to the ground by an invading army. The lonely voyage of an elephant from Kerala to a princess’s palace in Morocco. A fabled cook who flavours his food with precious stones. A coterie of international diplomats trapped in near-earth orbit. These, and the other stories in this collection, reveal an extraordinary storyteller, whose tales emerge from a tradition that includes the creators of the Arabian Nights and the Kathasaritsagara, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Angela Carter and other ancient and modern masters of fabulist, surrealist and magical short stories. Furiously inventive, beautifully crafted and remarkably assured, Swimmer Among the Stars announces the arrival of a blazing new talent. |
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| Ishaan Tharoor |
 Ishaan Tharoor is a foreign affairs writer at the Washington Post, where he helms the newspaper's WorldViews blog and writes on a wide range of issues, from the conflicts of the Middle East to the global debates around multiculturalism to essays on literature and world history. Between 2006 and 2014, he was a writer and editor at Time magazine, based first in its Asia headquarters in Hong Kong and later in New York. |
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| Shashi Tharoor |
 An author, politician, and former international civil servant, Dr. Shashi Tharoor straddles several worlds of experience. Currently a second-term Lok Sabha Member of Parliament (MP) representing the Thiruvananthapuram constituency and Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, he has previously served as Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. During his nearly three-decade long prior career at the United Nations, he served as a peacekeeper, refugee worker, and administrator at the highest levels, serving as Under-Secretary General during Kofi Annan’s leadership of the organisation. Dr. Tharoor is also an award-winning author of fifteen books of both fiction as well as non-fiction.
Born in London in 1956, Dr. Tharoor was educated in India and the United States, completing a PhD in 1978 at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at the Tufts University. While there, he received the Robert B. Stewart Prize for Best Student and also helped found and served as the first Editor of the Fletcher Forum of International Affairs, a journal now in its 39th year. Dr. Tharoor was also awarded an honorary D.Litt by the University of Puget Sound and a Doctorate Honoris Causa in History by the University of Bucharest. In 1998 the World Economic Forum in Davos named him a “Global Leader of Tomorrow”. He is also a recipient of several awards that include a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India’s highest honour for overseas nationals. In 2012 the King of Spain awarded him the Encomienda de la Real Order Espanola de Carlos III. Among numerous other awards are one for "New Age Politician of the Year" from NDTV, the Hakim Khan Sur Award for National Integration, and the Priyadarshini Award for Excellence in Diplomacy.
Dr. Shashi Tharoor was a pioneer in using social media as an instrument of political interaction. Till 2013 he was India’s most-followed politician on Twitter, until being overtaken that year by the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. He was the first Indian to reach 10,000 and 100,000 followers on the medium, and currently has 4.1 million followers. |
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