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ANU LAKHAN

Dearly Departed: A Conversation with Anu Lakhan

Novel Niche is thrilled to unveil this exclusive interview with Anu Lakhan, Trinidadian poet, fiction writer, editor and debut chapbookist. First published by Argotiers Press in 2018, Letters to K is hilarious and heartbreaking, audacious and abashed, like no other letter-set to a dead writer you’ve ever read before.

Here, I sit with Lakhan over metaphysical tea, and let her tell me all about…

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— On a Bowl of Knives by Anu Lakhan (2019)

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SOMETHING about the planes. They draw him in. Perhaps it’s the drama, the epic struggle of the airmen fighting to get their machines off the ground. It gives him hope when it comes to his writing. Yet, leave the excitement of this air show in 1909 behind and fast forward to his deathbed decades later, in 1924, when he is editing ‘The Hunger Artist’. The joy of ‘The Aeroplanes at Brescia’ is gone. Instead, Franz Kafka gives us the story of a man nobody believes, a man unable to escape suspicion no matter his sincerity, a hero grounded and made subject to the merciless, never-ending gaze of onlookers, who dies miserably in a cage. The metamorphosis is complete.

What happened to him? The mysterious menace that pervades Kafka’s work clouds our understanding of his life. We are tempted to believe he was miserable, dying at the relatively young age of 40. He starves to death. He has a form of tuberculosis that seals his throat. His three sisters Ellie, Valli, and Ottla are murdered during the Holocaust by the Nazis. Had he survived he too might have met the gas chamber.

But just as his novels are left incomplete, so too Kafka’s life story. More manuscripts, more diaries, more pieces of correspondence are destined to emerge. For decades they have been subject to a legal battle, scattered in bank vaults and safes in Israel and Switzerland thanks to Max Brod’s secretary Esther Hoffe. Yet, even if Kafka the man is yet to fully come out, some readers can already sense what town knows. Here is a writer deeply concerned with the oppressive power of the deep state; who fears autocrats as much as he fears fathers; who exudes queer sexual desire but must hide it. This is the world in which Anu Lakhan’s new chapbook Letters to K, complete with drawings by Kevin Bhall, arrives.

— from 'Reading Kafka in Port of Spain', my review of Anu Lakhan's Letters to K.

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Letters to K - Anu Lakhan

Letters to K – Anu Lakhan

by Shivanee Ramlochan, Paper Based Blogger

Argotiers Press, 2018.

“The meaning of life is that it stops,” wrote Jewish novelist Franz Kafka. Taking this thought up beyond the grave, Anu Lakhan’s masterfully curious chapbook, Letters to K, asks the extraordinary question, “How do I send a letter to my dead best friend?” There is, of course, the small matter of our narrator living in an entirely…

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The Strange Years of My Life by Nicholas Laughlin: A Review by Anu Lakhan

Peepal Tree Press Ltd ISBN: 9781845232924 Pages: 86 Published: 06 April 2015 And now for something completely different. This is a guest post by Anu Lakhan, a poet and writer from Trinidad and Tobago. She’s reviewing a volume of poetry by her friend of many years standing, fellow Trinidadian Nicholas Laughlin. Nicholas Laughlin is the editor of the Caribbean Review of Books and the culture and…

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