LONGLIST 2008 - IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Anita Rau Badami's acclaimed novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? chronicles the stories of three women, linked in love and tragedy, over a span of fifty years, sweeping from the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 to the explosion of Air India flight 182 off the coast of Ireland in 1985. Alive with Badami's warmth and humanity, and brimming with the daily sights and sounds of both Canada and India, this novel brilliantly conveys the tumultuous effects of the past on new immigrants, and the ways in which memory and myth, the personal and the political, become heartrendingly connected.

Anita Rau Badami was born in India in 1961. Although her family’s roots are in southern India, Badami spent most of her life in the north and eastern parts of the country, moving every two to three years because of her father’s job as an officer in the Indian Railway. She earned a degree in English from the University of Madras, studied journalism at Sophia College in Bombay and then spent many years as a copywriter, journalist and children’s writer before emigrating to Canada in 1991, following her husband to Calgary, where he had gone to pursue his master’s degree in Environmental Science. Raising a young son and grappling with Canadian winters, Badami took creative writing courses, which eventually led to her own master’s degree in English Literature. Her thesis at the University of Calgary went on to become her hugely successful first novel, Tamarind Mem, published in 1996. The novel landed her firmly on the map as a talented new Canadian writer to watch.

In 2000, Badami published her second novel, The Hero’s Walk. By then she was living in Vancouver, where the family had moved so that her husband could complete a PhD in Planning. The Hero’s Walk was met with great critical acclaim; it won the Regional Commonwealth Writers Prize, Italy’s Premio Berto and was named a Washington Post Best Book of 2001. It was also longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize. Both Tamarind Mem and The Hero’s Walk have been published in many countries throughout the world.

Shortly after the publication of her second novel, Anita Rau Badami won the Marian Engel Award. She is the youngest woman ever to receive this award, which is given to a Canadian woman author in mid-career for outstanding prose writing.