Koushik Banerjea

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Koushik Banerjea

Welcome

Fiction

Category Unknown

Another Kind of Concrete

Dubwise Nocturne in Salvation in Stereo, A Neon Sunrise Anthology

In a Time of Monsters appearing in The Write Launch

Sour Face Nasal Whine appearing in Minor Literatures

Cagey appearing in Writers Resist

An Extended Pause 

Pause appearing in Shots in the Dark

Boxing Clever appearing in Verbal London Books issue 4

Slow appearing in Verbal London Books issue 5

Dilip appearing in Verbal London Books issue 6

Voices appearing in Verbal London Books issue 7

Novel London Prizewinners

Prizewinner in the Novel London Literary Competition 2023!

Prizewinner in the Novel London Literary Competition 2023 for the novel Animal Nightlife (forthcoming). 

NOVEL LONDON has worked with and promoted over 150 emerging and established writers since 2015. It is now a yearly literary competition and festival focusing on the novel. 

Poetry

Collapse in Mogadored

Farce in Razur Cuts

Dream Palace in House of Poetry, Issue 2

Tea in Third Space anthology

Category Unknown, A Novel by K Banerjea

Category Unknown

Life on a London council estate leads the entrepreneurial Conrad on a conflicted journey between his ambition, his loyalty to his Jamaican nan and his need to redeem himself. The suppressed scars of a life under the Spanish dictator Franco resurface in Laura’s traumatic coming of age.

Reviews

New Lines Magazine

Asian Culture Vulture

3am

Morning Star

International Times

BooksCover2Cover

Available from

London Books

Another Kind of Concrete

Another Kind of Concrete

K., a bookish young boy, learns to duck the fare but not the issues in this darkly comic coming-of-age tale which largely unfolds in a city (London) and an era (the 1970s) where everything, from the culture, to the people, to the buildings themselves, seems to be in open revolt.

Full book details

 

Interviews, Articles and Book Trailer

Listen to the BBC interview on the Robert Elms show

In Conversation with Koushik Banerjea

Q&A with Koushik Banerjea

Asian Culture Vulture Review

Morning Star Review

International Times Review

Trailer produced by Phil Bowne, The Book Network

An Extended Pause

Journalism

DJ Shadow Meets Cockney Rejects Uptown in 3am Magazine

It's a London Thing in BooksCover2Cover

Some Unknown Pleasures in Morocco Bound Review

Telling Tales in Brixton Review of Books Issue 11

Til the Pigs Come Round in 3am Magazine

Seal Club Furies in 3am Magazine

Editor at large Southern Discomfort webzine

'Second Generation' magazine

The Black Media Journal

 

Head scratching stuff

Banerjea, K. “Fight Club: aesthetics, hybridisation, and the construction of Rogue masculinities in Sholay and Deewaar” in Bollyworld: Indian Cinema through a Global lens, Eds Kaur, R and Sinha, A, Permanent Black, New Delhi & London, 2005.

Banerjea, K. “The tyranny of the binary: race, nation and the logic of failing liberalisms” in Ethnic and Racial Studies (July 2002, Vol 25 no 4).               

Banerjea, K. “Sounds of Whose Underground: the fine tuning of diaspora in an age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Theory, Culture and Society (June 2000, Vol. 17 no 3).

Banerjea, K. “Sonic Diaspora and its dissident footfalls” in Postcolonial Studies - Culture, Politics, Economy, Volume 1, Number 3, Carfax Publishing, Oxfordshire & Melbourne, 1998.    

Bio

‘Clean living under difficult circumstances.’.  South London in the 1970s and 1980s was the incubator, but a love of books, words and the escapist properties of alphabet soup were largely instilled in this author by resilient immigrant parents, who envisaged a better life in London than the one they’d been forced to flee as Partition refugees. 

Telling stories (making stuff up), sometimes being quite funny and having the ability to kick, or hit a ball, were the salve for an otherwise skittish, bookish child.  As was a love of music.  The author’s formative years happily coinciding with a peculiarly rich strain of pop cultural invention which was never that far away in his little corner of south London.  In reality this meant being spoilt for choice, and somehow present at the birth pangs of hip hop, as well as at the death throes of punk; being privy to the latest variants of soul, reggae and 2-Tone.  Smiley Culture sharing top billing with the ghost of the Specials at the Lewisham Odeon.  And if he just cared to look up, his ears would be filled by the illicit sounds of Pirate radio in the high rises.  At home, teenage years were marked by the discovery of Sam Selvon and the kitchen sink drama of Squeeze for company – gentle tales of ‘us’ and girls from Clapham, but with added bite and resonance for a kid who wanted something more than the limited possibilities of a particular postcode.  Stories too from his Mum and Dad, of the old country, of something bucolic, before men with maps and ideas of ‘purity’ turned their lives inside out, and set them on their way from one South to another.

Those are the strands that have lived in the author from young, and in one way or another have informed his adult life too.  So the bookishness eventually led to a PhD and the reified turf of academia, while the mischief (and scuffle) of the vernacular found expression in youth work.  Not always a happy fit, the suspicion sometimes lingering in both camps, a la Stringer Bell, that this might be  ‘a man without a country’.  But unlike Stringer, the author is still here, still telling stories, and right now that’s probably enough.

 

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