What can you tell me about the author Christopher Kremmer?

Australian author Christopher Kremmer

Christopher Kremmer is one of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Australia's most respected and popular writers of narrative non-fiction, whose work has been compared favourably with that of V.S Naipaul and Bruce Chatwin. Educated at the University of Canberra , he spent a decade in Asia working as a foreign correspondent, producing a series of award-winning bestsellers, including The Carpet Wars, Bamboo Palace and his latest book, Inhaling the Mahatma, a personal history of India. Like few writers over the past decade, he has explored Asia's tumultuous journey from tradition towards modernity.

His early short stories won several awards, including the Patricia Rappolt Prize for young writers in the prestigious Canberra Times National Short Story Competition for 'The Birthday Party'. Other short fiction, including 'Two Hundred Years from Home' and 'Footnotes to the Affair', was published in Australian Short Stories.

After completing a Bachelor's degree in Professional Writing at the University of Canberra, Christopher worked in broadcast and print media in Australia. During a period spent in London he wrote comedy sketches for the long-running Canal Cafe Theatre company, and some of his work was performed at the
Edinburgh Arts Festival.

The publication in 1997 of Christopher Kremmer's first book of literary non-fiction was hailed as a watershed in Australian writing about Asia. The Australian's Review of Books' Neil James wrote that "Stalking the Elephant Kings (later updated and republished as Bamboo Palace) is part travel book, part history, part diary and part detective story. And sheer storytelling."

"Kremmer displays an almost fictive control over his material. Each incident of his travels is brought to life with the dynamic of a good short story. Despite this control, he retains a journalist's stance, allowing the reader to form his
or her own judgments and to engage imaginatively with the subject. He is a deft observer of the poignant detail, such as the sight of billowing American parachutes; leftovers from the war, these are employed throughout the temples and markets of Laos as shade marquees. They are a symbol of the massive impact of civil and global warfare and the practical efforts of a people caught in the crossfire."

"After reading this book, the Elephant Kings and the fate of Laos have become firmly etched into my cultural consciousness. My marginal knowledge of the country is permanently enhanced: from the former royal palace at
Luang Prabang to the archaeological sites at the Plain of Jars; from the revolutionary caves at the heart of the communist revolution in Viengsai to the contemporary mixed community in the capital Vientiane. Like Kremmer, I trace avidly the stories of the Elephant Kings, of the Red Prince who was central to the revolution, of the royal puppeteers and silversmiths and their fluctuating fortunes.

"Here at last is a general book that addresses all the elements that the others in the survey failed to do. It is accessible and it genuinely engages a nation and its people without judgment or paternalism. It builds cultural understanding. I feel I know where Laos is and something of what it is. The cultural compass finally
has the right orientation."

"Stalking the Elephant Kings is a book that suggests that Australian publishing in Asia can succeed. It deserves to do well because it places human engagement before gross domestic product, culture before trade. Perhaps it can stand as an example to the rest of the publishing industry in Australia."

The book won the inaugural Qantas/City of Brisbane Prize for Asia-Pacific Travel Writing and was published in the United States, Britain and Thailand. In 2003, it was updated and re-issued as Bamboo Palace. With his next book, Christopher solidified his reputation internationally as a writer of critically acclaimed narrative
non-fiction.

The Carpet Wars, a portrait of Afghanistan and Islam in crisis, was published in nine countries, including Japanese and Spanish translations, and became an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for all major Australian awards
for non-fiction, including The Age Book of the Year, the Courier Mail Book of the Year, and the NSW and Victorian Premier's Literary awards.

Dr Juliet Peters, writing in Artlink magazine, said "I mean no insult in placing The Carpet Wars by Christopher Kremmer within Chatwin's genre. Kremmer's decade long textual journey through the Middle East, Islam and its conflicts is informed by the best aspects of this modern genre...Evocative turns of phrase make visible far away places for the couch-bound reader. Anecdotes flow freely, well paced in classical writing style, until the denouement, either humorous or tragic. People whom the reader will never meet take on real dimensions through the text.

"I generally find current fiction ultimately unsatisfactory, conversely the non-fictional Carpet Wars has a serious mission. Accessible and moving, poetic and engrossing, it speaks of cultures and events usually rendered
fixed and one-dimensional by western media."

In 2003 The Carpet Wars was short-listed for the New South Wales Premier's History Prize. The judges citation described the book as "an historical and contemporary war and peace travelogue, political critique, a lesson in carpet-making history and trade, a personal account, a religious object
lesson and a window into ancient and modern Islamic culture, modern tribalism and modern war."

"Kremmer rolls out a number of broad and significant histories in an accessible way...Without writing an apologia for past colonialisms, the barbarities of war, the tenets of Islam and the unpredictability of human behaviour, Kremmer, a journalist and not an historian, has provided deep historical insights.
The Carpet Wars offers a new understanding of a particular history at a time when it has been - and still is - most needed."<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Kremmer’s next book, Inhaling the Mahatma was launched in India in January 2007 by former prime minister I.K. Gural. The book is a sweeping personal history of India, concentrating on the country’s tortured path from Gandhian self sufficiency to capital global player via the pitfalls of communal violence and Hindu nationalism. The books received rave reviews in the author’s Australian homeland, as well as in his adopted home of India. Writing in the Indian newspaper Mint Chandrahas Choudhury observed that “From Megasthenes to Mark Twain, Alberuni to Orwell, visitors from antiquity to the modern times have interpreted India to the world. In time, Indians themselves have sought in the works of these writers a picture of their past."

"Two recent books by foreign correspondents in India worthily carry forward this rich tradition. Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods, published last year, supplied in lucid, muscular prose a magisterial analysis of the Indian state, economy and foreign relations since Independence. Luce’s book is complemented perfectly by Australian journalist Christopher Kremmer’s Inhaling the Mahatma, which, although covering some of the same territory as Luce’s, is in spirit a wholly different work. More personal and lyrical than Luce, roving widely and sympathetically among both high and low, and providing superb eyewitness accounts of key events of our recent history, Kremmer tells a double story: of watching a country change, and of being reshaped himself in the deepest ways."

"Kremmer served two stints in India during the 1990s, and closely saw many of its most tumultuous happenings. Kremmer takes in the Indian experience through a journalist’s nose, and produces a double-edged story—India at the crossroads and his own self-discovery. Following Rajiv Gandhi on the campaign trail in Uttar Pradesh in 1991, he spoke with the former prime minister, confident of a second term in office, only a few days before he was assassinated. Thirteen years later, accompanying the newly elected MP, Rahul Gandhi, on a tour of his constituency, he notes the uncanny similarities between son and father, and the unquestioning, even comical, devotion the Gandhi name inspires among the masses. “On one occasion, a knot of elderly women mistook me for Rahul,” writes Kremmer, “and had to be prised off my feet before falling at his.” Kremmer was also present when the Babri Masjid went down in 1992. His account records the pandemonium of “thousands of kar sevaks teeming over the crumbling structure like ants on an anthill” and his own scramble for safety, but it goes much further than that."

"The heart of Kremmer’s book is a meditation on Ayodhya leading out in several directions: on the meaning of the Ramayana in Indian life, on how faith can shade into religious chauvinism, on the politics of India’s past and the divisive “history wars” of the 1990s. (“History wars,” he notes sensibly, “are civil wars without the gunpowder.”) His must be one of the fullest accounts of the repercussions on Indian life of the events of 6 December 1992. To a journalist’s nose for a good story—the title of his book turns out not to be a metaphor for his Indian experience, but a case of quite literally “inhaling the Mahatma”—Kremmer adds a practised eye for detail (he has previously written two travel books, on Afghanistan and Laos) and a novelist’s love for the riches of language.

Returning to New Delhi after six years, he finds that “the staid, bureaucratic capital wasn’t just growing, it was proliferating, throwing off far-flung suburbs like sparks from a Catherine wheel.” On the banks of the Ganga in Varanasi, “dhobis slap wet laundry not far from cadavers roasting on pyres, life’s drudgery and death’s drama played out on a common stage.” Investigating the problem of legal pendency, Kremmer arrives in Allahabad, where more court cases are filed than in any other Indian city, to find that the oldest case being tried dates back to 1965. An official confides that “slowly we are moving forward to the present.”

"As with the incident in which he finds himself breathing in the Mahatma’s ashes, the real flows naturally into the surreal. Travelling and observing, and changing from “New Delhi expat to old Delhi local” after marrying an Indian girl, Kremmer finds himself being infiltrated by the ways of his adopted country. “Small superstitions or words, particular festivals and customs, had permeated my being as if by osmosis,” he recounts. Pestered with the standard Indian question about why he has no children, he learns to say “Bhagwan ki merzi hai” (It’s the will of god) while “glancing skywards with a resigned expression.” “Barriers were falling away,” writes Kremmer towards the close, “and I experienced a feeling of being at home in India, taking pleasure in what is, rather than fussing constantly over what it should be.”Inhaling deeply of much more than just the Mahatma, Kremmer has exhaled an account of India of almost unmatched richness and subtlety."

Inhaling the Mahatma was short-listed for the Australian Book Industry Awards non-fiction section 2007.

Kremmer's work during a decade spent as a foreign correspondent in Asia—first for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and later for The Sydney Morning Herald—earned him an international profile as an intelligent and sensitive observer of the region.

He teaches narrative non-fiction writing at workshops around Australia, and is a guest lecturer at the Australian Defence College and at other universities, conferences and community groups. Born in Sydney he divides his time between homes in India and Australia's Southern Highlands. Christopher has recently returned to writing fiction, with the publication of the short story 'The Global Empire of the Heart' (published in Come Away With Me, Random House)

(The above material was sourced from the HarperCollins Australia Publishers website, Christopher Kremmer official website www.chrisotpherkremmer.com and news reports.)

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