Stories from India – Belonging, Borders, and Identity
September 23 @ 18:45 - 20:30
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?
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