Stories from India – Belonging, Borders, and Identity. An Evening with International Award-Winning Author Jeet Thayil

Stories from India – Belonging, Borders, and Identity
An Evening with International Award-Winning Author Jeet Thayil

Jeet Thayil is the Curator in Residence at this year’s 26th International Literature Festival Berlin. His writing moves between fiction, poetry, and documentary storytelling, creating layered portraits of cities and lives in transition.

His debut novel Narcopolis (2012), which draws on his experience with addiction, takes readers into the opium dens of Mumbai. It reveals the city’s hidden underworld, exposing marginal characters and their stories, drawing the reader into a hazy but vivid urban people-scape shaped by addiction, survival, and change.

His more recent work, The Elsewhereans: A Documentary Novel (2025), is a partially fictional account of his family history that challenges the boundaries of storytelling, crossing literary genres and moving between cities, regions, and countries as well as spaces of family life and different layers of society, to trace migration, belonging, and the search for home beyond cities, countries, and borders.

Across his work, Jeet Thayil returns to his experience of living between places, where stories shift as they cross borders and generations. Rather than a single narrative of India, his writing opens multiple perspectives on cities and shifting forms of belonging.

How does literature help us understand how we live in cities? How does it shape the way we remember stories? And how does it reflect the way identity and belonging are formed in a world defined by movement?

Join us for a short reading by author Jeet Thayil, followed by a conversation with Jasnea Sarma.

Jeet Thayil is a poet, novelist, musician and publisher. He was born near the Muvattupuzha River in Kerala, India. As a boy he travelled through much of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia with his father, T.J.S. George, a writer and editor. He worked as a journalist for twenty-one years in Bombay, Bangalore, Hong Kong and New York City. In 2005 he began to write fiction. The first instalment of his Bombay Trilogy, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, won the DSC Prize, and became an unlikely bestseller. His book of poems These Errors are Correct won the Sahitya Akademi Award (India's National Academy of Letters). His musical collaborations include the opera Babur in London. His essays, poetry and short fiction have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Granta, TLS, Esquire, The London Magazine, The Times, The Guardian and The Paris Review, among other venues. He is the founder of Thayil Editions, an imprint devoted to experimental Indian fiction and poetry. Jeet Thayil's latest collection of poetry is I'll Have it Here, winner of the Sarojini Naidu Award and the Kalinga Literary Award. His new novel is The Elsewhereans.


Jasnea Sarma is an ethnographer and political geographer from Assam, Northeast India. She holds a Ph.D. from National University of Singapore and teaches political geography and critical geopolitics at the University of Zurich, where she leads a research group on global borders, migration, and frontier environments. Her award-winning research draws on more than a decade of on-the-ground, multilingual, and multi-sited fieldwork across the borderlands of Northeast India, China, and Myanmar, exploring how borders, migration, and environmental change shape communities, identities, and experiences of belonging. Having lived and worked across India, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Myanmar, and Switzerland, she brings both scholarly and personal perspectives on boundaries and movement between places, cultures, and languages. She is a senior editor of the journal Geopolitics and is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of South Asian Borders, forthcoming in 2027. More about her projects and publications can be found here.

In Cooperation with

The 26th International Literature Festival Berlin will bring together over 100 international authors from September 3 to 12 for book launches, readings, and panel discussions. As Curator in Residence, Jeet Thayil is organizing a festival within the festival where various art forms and cultures come together, with a focus on improvisation and collaboration.

Read more about the event and Jeet Thayil here.