PARIS: With Indian writers reaping awards and topping best-seller lists worldwide, this year’s Paris book fair is putting the spotlight on the country’s literary output.

“Indian authors are based everywhere, express themselves everywhere, publish everywhere, and the entire world is beginning to take interest in this immense reservoir of talent,” said Dominique Vitalyos, an adviser at the National Book Centre (CNL).

Some 30 Indian novelists, both from the diaspora and India, have been invited to take part in discussions on Indian literature during the five day fair, to March 27, which last year attracted 174,000 visitors.

Among those invited are Vikram Seth, a poet and novelist often cited as the star of India’s new generation of novelists, who wrote “The Golden Gate” set in California, and “An Equal Music” set in contemporary Europe.

Journalist-turned-writer Tarun Tejpal, whose “The Alchemy of Desire” won rave reviews worldwide, will also be in Paris, along with Abha Dawesar, author of “That Summer in Paris” and “Babyji” (being released in French at the fair) and Shashi Deshpande, whose novels include “That Long Silence”.

Western interest in Indian writers grew in 1989 when Iranian clerics issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his “Satanic Verses,” said Marc Parent, a foreign literature editor at French publishing house Buchet-Chastel, which specialises in Indian works.

Readers and publishers alike, he said, then discovered contemporary Indian writers who differed with novelists from the post-colonial period.

Eight years later, when Arundhati Roy carried off the Booker prize for “The God of Small Things,” both English-language and French publishers intensified efforts to find new Indian writers.—AFP