Novelist and playwright, explores the truths of his land and youth
Rishi Mittal (they/them) // Contributor
Alex Baidanuta (she/her) // Illustrator
Anosh Irani is a world-renowned Indo-Canadian novelist and playwright. For over two decades, he has plucked his protagonists from the places we choose to ignore: those who have left their bitter homes––the orphanages and red-light districts––in search for better lives they’ve rarely found. Their trauma follows them like shadows onto newer shores. They are forever marred by the violence of their childhood.
Irani has won a staggering amount of critical acclaim and praise for his zeal and brilliance. While awarding this Capilano University alumnus the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award in 2023––one of Canada’s top writing awards––the jury highlighted Irani’s skill at inhabiting “characters for whom hope is an unaffordable luxury,” and for forcing us to keep “our gaze on the depredations of power.” He shows us the naked truths from which we hide.
His stories reveal the truths of the people and lands of his youth in ways that only fiction can do: slantly.
Perhaps his process is most apparent in his 2016 novel, The Parcel, set in Asia’s largest red-light district, where sex work gives way to slavery. The setting and story is personal to Irani. “I grew up right opposite the red-light district,” he tells the Courier, “It was my backyard.”
He spent long years researching the people that populated the “landscape of [his] childhood” including sex workers, pimps and members of the transgender* community. “The ability to observe,” he says, “requires one to be immersed in an experience and yet have a perspective on it while the experience is unfolding.” It is a quality shared by the best writers. In this way, he “live[s] with the book,” with the people who would dance and cry in his book, long before he writes “a single word.”
Yet, his oeuvre is all fiction. “I am not limited by fact,” he says, “I’m interested in truth: a higher truth, an emotional truth, a spiritual truth. The novel is my vehicle to get there.”
While he has always been a storyteller, his decision to craft these tales in novels and plays was relatively recent, spurred on by his move to Canada. “The isolation I felt, the loneliness, made me turn to literature even more,” he recalls,“I immersed myself in it. It was a gift, a painful one.” He would trawl second-hand bookstores for writing that pulled him in, and he comments, “A book was a refuge.”
CapU—then known as Capilano College—was a series of firsts and holds fond memories. From his first college-level literature class with Tim Acton to studying world literature with Jenny Penberthy, where he read The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola. “It resonated with me a lot when I was trying to figure out what to do for my first novel,” Irani says, “To this day it’s one of my favourite books.”
He remembers conversing with Bob Sherrin, his first creative writing instructor, about the interplay between dialogue and scene. “Bob and I are still in touch,” he mentions, “He’s been so wonderful. Lovely, lovely guy.”
Today, he is a professor of writing at the University of British Columbia, where he nurtures the next generation. Every writer’s journey is their own and if he equips his students with only one tool, it is craft. “When opportunity knocks but at a craft level you’re not ready then you won’t get published.”
Improving your craft is simple, if not easy. You don’t need to be enrolled in a creative writing program. “Do what we all do,” he says, “We read, we write and we submit our work to literary magazines, to agents, to publishers.”
Per Irani, read widely and voraciously. Read world literature, in translation if you need to. For him, this has meant reading the works of his Canadian contemporaries like Madeleine Thien and Christina Sharpe, and then stepping beyond these shores to read the beautiful short stories of Naiyer Masud and the harrowing but brilliant Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov.
Above all, he says, writing “takes time and practice.” Failure will be a life-long companion in your life-long journey to tell your truth. “You need stamina and endurance” to be a writer. But, as long as you commit, “you can just get better and better.” There is no secret, no shortcut, no magic wand. “There is nothing else.”
Editor’s note
*The Hijra community of India is commonly referred to as transgender, but is actually understood to be mainly made up of intersex people, with the connecting feature of the community being that they identify as neither male nor female. Hijra people have been ostracized to live on the outskirts of society, and have found community alongside many other underrepresented and marginalized communities in India, as Irani explains. While Irani refers to both Hijra and transgender people in his work, we are unsure of whether he is referring to the same community (in which case the usage of the generalized term “transgender” would be a result of common misconception surrounding the community; Hijra is an all-inclusive term). This note was added to provide a full scope of the landscape for our readers.