A discussion between Kunal Basu and Sooni Taraporevala, moderated by Jeet Thayil on the novel in adaptation, exploring questions such as: faithfulness or distance? Should the filmmaker follow the book, or can he use it as an inspiration for his own creation? And – lost in translation? Does a book lose some of its qualities when it is translated into a visual medium, or can book and film complement and enrich each other? Kunal Basu is the author of three acclaimed novels – The Opium Clerk, The Miniaturist, and Racists – and a collection of stories, The Japanese Wife, the lead story of which has been made into a film by India’s celebrated director Aparna Sen. He has acted in films and on stage, written poetry and screenplays, and critical commentary on his works has been anthologised in Romancing the Strange: The Fiction of Kunal Basu, published by the Shakespeare Society. He was born in Calcutta and has travelled widely. He teaches at Oxford University and is married with one daughter.

Sooni Taraporevala was born in 1957. She was raised in Bombay, educated at Harvard & New York University after which she returned to India to work as a freelance still photographer. Her photographs have been exhibited in India, the United States, France, and Britain. In 2000 she published a book of her photographs PARSIS: The Zoroastrians of India - A Photographic Journey. A second edition was published by Overlook Press, NY in 2004 and is currently in print.

In 1988, with the success of her first screenplay Salaam Bombay! she found herself with a screenwriting career. She lived in Los Angeles, wrote screenplays for a variety of directors, producers, studios, before moving back to India in 1993. Most recently, she wrote the screenplay for Mira Nair’s The Namesake. Her other screenplays are Mississippi Masala, Such A Long Journey, My Own Country, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and Little Zizou After 20 years of writing screenplays Sooni Taraporevala directed her first film Little Zizou in 2007. Sooni lives in Bombay with her husband Dr Firdaus Bativala and their two children Jahan & Iyanah.

Jeet Thayil was born in Kerala in 1959 and educated in Jesuit schools in Hongkong, New York and Bombay. He is a performance poet, songwriter and musician who plays guitar with Bombay Down (NYC) and Sridhar/Thayil (Bangalore). His four poetry collections include These Errors Are Correct (Tranquebar Books, 2008) and English (Penguin/Rattapallax, 2004), and he is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, forthcoming in 2008) and Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora (Routledge, 2006). In 2004, he moved from New York to New Delhi. He currently lives in Bangalore.