Off the Beaten Path: Fiction writers Alice Albinia and Sabina Murray 02/02/12 February 2, 2012

Are you in dire need of a bon voyage? Come hear two acclaimed novelists read works set in the places usually at the periphery of the map. Alice Albinia re-imagines the Mahabharata in urban Delhi in her debut novel of manners, Leela’s Book. A character-packed page-turner, Leela’s Book is a fable about family and storytelling and a "rollercoaster romp through the centuries, accompanied by a disgruntled Ganesh” (Kishwar Desai, India Today). PEN Faulkner winner Sabina Murray chronicles four thousand years of the bravest and most sadistic men who ever lived: the colonial pioneers of the Age of Exploration. Her short story collection Tales of the New World is jam-packed with "Italian noblemen, Africa chiefs, Russian prisoners, Australian Aborigines, even Aztec kings" and talks of "times and places, horrors and joys; of oceans, deserts, starvation—of quite simply everything—very beautifully, bringing it all close to us, to here, to now" (New York Times Book Review).

Alice Albinia is the author of Empires of the Indus, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Authors’ Club Dolman Travel Award, and the Jerwood/Royal Society of Literature Prize. Her writing has appeared in The Guardianand the Financial Times. She lives in England.

At the age of two, Sabina Murray and her family moved from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to Perth, Australia and in 1980, the family moved again to Manila. She did not return to live in the States until she attended college. She "is an explorer – someone with a hankering to visit places others tend to avoid" (New York Times). She is the author of Slow Burn, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, Forgery and The Caprices. She is also writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, released in 2005. Murray is professor of English and teaches in the MFA/Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

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