Neel Mukherjee – photo by Nick Tucker

Friday 21 February 2025
University College, Oxford

Univ in the Arts and the Shakespeare Society present

An evening at Univ with Neel Mukherjee
with Ankhi Mukherjee, Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford

Please book your place by 7 February 2024

We are delighted to invite you to an evening at Univ with critically-acclaimed, award-winning novelist Neel Mukherjee FRSL (1992, English Language and Literature). Neel’s novels move between India and England from the 1900s to the present, and explore the connections between individuals, their environments and histories, and the systemic forces that drive and constrain them.

Neel’s latest novel, Choice (2024), was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. It was picked as one of the top 10 books of 2024 by the Wall Street Journal and as a “Book of the Year” in The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. A devastating exploration of ethics and the limits of personal choice that confronts assumptions about economics, race and appropriation, it takes an experimental, inventive approach to form, and was described by Sarah Waters as his “best book yet: a brooding meditation on the complexities of agency and duty, freedom and guilt, in a savagely unequal world.”

His debut novel, A Life Apart, which is partly set in a vividly realised 1990s Oxford, won the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction in 2010. It was originally published in India in 2008 as Past Continuous. Neel’s second novel, The Lives of Others (2014), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award and won the Encore Award, and his third novel, A State of Freedom, was a New York Times “100 Notable Books of the Year”, described by NPR as “a marvel of a book, shocking and beautiful.”

Edmund White said of Neel’s work, “Mukherjee is a great novelist. And a moralist in the central English tradition of E. M. Forster and Iris Murdoch. Like those classic novelists, he knows how to clothe ethical conflicts with sweeping narrative and convincing detail… a writer of genius.”

There will be plenty of time for questions from the audience, and copies of Neel’s books will be available to purchase during the drinks after the event.

Tickets

Please book your place by 7 February 2025 using the form on this page, which will give you the option to book either for the discussion and drinks only, or for the discussion, drinks and Formal Hall, while places remain available. You can also book to watch the event online via Zoom.

The participation of current students in this event has been kindly subsidised by the Shakespeare Society.

If you have any questions about access, please contact the Development, Communications and Alumni Relations office via rsvp@univ.ox.ac.uk.

Please let us know about any dietary requirements when you book.

Please note that audio, photographs and video footage may be taken throughout our events. These may be used by the College for marketing and publicity in our publications, on our website and in social media or in any third party publication. Please contact the event organiser if you have any concerns or if you wish to be exempted from this activity.