Ardashir vakil biography

Ardashir "Ardu" Vakil is an Indian-born British author whose first novel, Beach Boy, won the Betty Trask Award in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Whitbread.
Ardashir "Ardu" Vakil is an Indian-born British author whose first novel, Beach Boy, won the Betty Trask Award in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award.
Ardashir Vakil (1962-).

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FAILURE AS A SURE STEP TOWARDS REGENERATION AND REVITALIZATION: THE THEME OF MARRIAGE IN ARDESHIR VAKIL’S ONE DAY(2003)

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Scholar Commons

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

3-30-2003

Publisher

Greenwood Press

Abstract

Ardashir Vakil was born in Bombay; his father was a nationally famous lawyer ("vakil" means lawyer, in fact) and his mother established a number of bookstores. Vaki l attended St. Mary's School and finished his schooling at The Doon School in the footh ills of the Himalayas before moving to Great Britain to take an English degree at Magdalene College in Cambridge. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters. He currently teaches at the Homsey School for Girls. While continuing to teach four days a week, he is working on his second novel, which is set in London.

Chapter of

South Asian Novelists in English: An A to Z Guide

Recommended Citation

Hawley, J. C. (2003). Ardashir Vakil. In J. C. Sanga (ed.), South Asian Novelists in English: An A to Z Guide (pp. 288-291). Greenwood Press.

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Ardashir Vakil: Having the write stuff

You don’t become an award-winning author without having a flair for words, and London-based Ardashir Vakil is certainly a good example of that. His impeccable sentences, tinged with the lilting accent that reveals his Mumbai origins, sound like they are plucked from a book.

Not surprising, as words and sentences are kind of an obsession of his, particularly when it comes to writing. And he certainly doesn’t mince his words.

“So many writers are lauded for writing a good ‘page-turner’, but I care massively about how each sentence in a story is written. I pay a lot of attention to the strength of the sentence, both in my own works and the books I read. If I read a page of bad writing, I can’t read the book,” Ardashir says. “The sentence is a microcosm of a story, and a book should be judged sentence by sentence. Look at the works of Raymond Carver or Haruki Murakami – you’re delighted just reading the first page. It’s not at all about turning to the next page!”

Understandably, Ardashir lists authors like J.D. Salinger and R.K. Narayan as