Murzban Shroff: Consulting Editor
“Travel writing is all about people, places, and beyond: a world without boundaries. As in all forms of writing, it must aspire to wear the mantle of literature: bold, exploratory, sentient.”
Murzban F. Shroff is a Mumbai-based writer. His fiction has appeared in over 75 literary journals in the U.S. and UK. He is the recipient of the Bacopa Review Fiction Award, the John Gilgun Fiction Award, and 7 Pushcart Prize nominations. His short story collection, Breathless in Bombay, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the best debut category from Europe and South Asia, and rated by the Guardian as among the ten best Mumbai books. His India collection, Third Eye Rising, explores issues such as caste, dowry, displacement, female exploitation, child apathy, and migrant identities. The book featured on the Esquire list of Best Books of 2021. Shroff’s novel, Waiting for Jonathan Koshy, was a finalist for the Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize.
Books
Jonathan Koshy was an old friend, a younger man, greatly appreciated for his wit, his effervescence, and his indignation, which was feigned most of the time and delivered for effect. Fast on the draw, faster on the uptake, he enjoyed wearing the airs of an outraged intellectual. He enjoyed turning theories on their head, disrupting a serious discussion, flaying smug-faced individuals who—he maintained—looked better on their backs, flattened. This was his style and he relished it. He made no bones about it. He was a slayer of institutions, a contrarian, a throw artist, the small man in a large crowd, who got noticed. Continue reading.
Shroff’s novel, Waiting for Jonathan Koshy, was published in the U.S. in fall 2022 by Astrophil Press at the University of South Dakota.
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“What a delicious irony sits at the heart of Murzban F. Shroff’s Waiting for Jonathan Koshy: the central character is almost larger than life, having done the things we all might dream of doing to serve others in desperate situations; but in his own life, for his own welfare, he is, in many ways powerless. By magnifying the heroic, Shroff unflinchingly portrays our human vulnerability. Waiting for Jonathan Koshy is a fascinating reading experience from a deeply skilled writer.” – Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize Winner, on Waiting for Jonathan Koshy.
“A splendid collection, beautifully crafted, full of dreams, fake marriages and endless longing. Shroff is a captivating storyteller.” – Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winner, on Third Eye Rising.
“Breathless in Bombay (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) is the real deal, giving us a taste of the genuine Mumbai” writes Anis Shivani, Huffington Post