Raw Umber : A Memoir

About the BookTHE BIGGEST LITERARY MEMOIR OF THE YEAR.The autobiographical essays in Raw Umber are as much about the steady pulse of Sara Rais childhood in the 1960s, as they are about the nature of remembering, and the role that memory plays in shaping a writers sensibility. It is the unconscious jottings of the mind, and the cadences that enter the ears, the inner life that develops during years of unhurried living in places like Allahabad and Banaras that prepare the ground for the fiction writer. With the figure of her grandfather Premchand looming over her childhood, and with others in her familygrandmother, parents, aunts, uncles and cousinsalso writers, it is hardly a surprise that Sara fell into writing. In this literary memoir, some of the characters in the family gallery are brought to life. In chronicling the life and times of one of Indias most illustrious literary families through the prism of her childhood, Sara Rai always keeps to her own remembering of the ever-changing past.A work of great tenderness and beauty.About the AuthorSara Rai is a fiction writer, literary translator and editor. She is the author of five collections of short stories and a novel in Hindi. She has translated, among other books, Premchands Kazaki and Other Marvellous Tales (Hachette, 2013) and, with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Vinod Kumar Shuklas Blue Is Like Blue (HarperCollins, 2019) which won the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year in 2020. Some of her work has been translated into Urdu, German, French, English and Italian. The Labyrinth, a collection of her stories translated into German by Johanna Hahn and published by Draupadi Verlag, Heidelberg, won the Coburg Rckert Prize 2019 and was nominated for the Weltempfnger Literaturpreis, Frankfurt, 2020.Sara Rai is Premchands granddaughter and she lives in Allahabad.