Anosh Irani
Former Arts Club location, 1181 Seymour St.
"I do believe that the stories are contained within your own body. They emerge from a place that is deep inside of me. It's not from the mind. The mind just aligns itself to the truth that the body wants to tell."
From CBC Books Interview (2016)
Growing up near Bombay’s red-light district, Anosh Irani was intrigued by its theatricality, which inspired him to write his first full-length play. Premiering in 2003 at the Arts Club, The Matka King is a darkly comic tale about a powerful eunuch who operates a brothel. Irani moved to Vancouver in 1998. While attending the UBC Creative Writing Program, he read unsolicited scripts for Arts Club Artistic Director Bill Millerd, who became his playwriting mentor. Five months after the premiere of The Matka King, Irani published his debut novel, The Cripple and His Talismans, in which the narrator searches for his severed left arm after awakening in hospital to discover it missing. In his second novel, The Song of Kahunsha, a boy runs away from an orphanage and gets caught up in the violence of communal riots. The book was an international bestseller and a finalist for Canada Reads in 2007. Irani’s 2006 play, Bombay Black, a love story between a blind man and a dancer, received the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play. Irani’s 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize long listed novel Dahanu Road was followed in 2016 by his acclaimed novel The Parcel, which returned to Bombay’s red light district. The story of a retired transgender sex worker who looks after a young girl who has been trafficked into a brothel, the novel was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. It was chosen as one of the books of the year by The Globe and Mail, National Post, and Quill & Quire.
