A Youth’s Publishing Success Story

By HIMAPALI DESAIIt began with the April volcanic ashes from Iceland. Prajwal Parajuly, then a person unsure of what he wanted out of life, found himself on a flight from Denver, USA, to London a few days before the ashes would wreak havoc on air travel.
He had flown in to interview on the University of Oxford’s Masters in Creative Writing course. He wondered if the few short stories he had written – so rough that they could very well have been notes – would land him a place on the highly selective course.
“I had written a few stories when I traveled around India, Nepal and Bhutan,” Parajuly says. “It had been a year since I left my job and, after a while, you begin questioning if travel is all you will do for the rest of your life.”
A GERM OF AN IDEA
In the year since he quit a successful career as an advertising executive at The Village Voice in New York, he lived as a bum on the beaches of the Seychelles, travelled the length and breadth of India and Nepal with his college roommate from California, all the while wondering what he should do with his life.
“The American H1B visa that my stupid job at The Village Voice provided me with wouldn’t be valid anymore, so returning to America to work wasn’t really an option,” Parajuly says. “May had become June and July was fast approaching.”
Shaun Moynihan, his roommate, had started blogging about his travels to keep in touch with his family in America.
“Here was a CPA – a smart man, yes, but also a man who disliked writing and was driven to write for two hours a day,” Prajwal says. “So I began writing, too.”
In the beginning he wrote about his travels. Once the roommate left for Europe, Prajwal, too, put a lid on his travels and flew to his hometown of Gangtok, Sikkim.
Prajwal remembers, “I was never an English major. I had written a few stories for my college Creative Writing professor, who was amazing, but that was it. The few cheeky columns I wrote involved little creativity.”
Before long, he had six stories, all about Nepali-speaking people the world over. Prajwal’s father is a Nepali-speaking Indian from Kalimpong, West Bengal, and his mother is from Nepal. Prajwal grew up in Gangtok, Sikkim.
“I wrote about what I knew,” Prajwal says. “The Bhutanese refugee situation, the instability in the hills, the Maoist problem. I didn’t know if they were good or bad, didn’t know if they’d see the light of day.”
The few trusted friends and his college Creative Writing professor he sent the stories to, however, intervened.
“They asked me to take the stories seriously,” Prajwal says. “They said, ‘all right, here’s something all of us in the West would love to read about. It’s so different, so esoteric.’”
He already had purchased return tickets to New York for February. His sister had mentioned in passing that he might want to join a Creative Writing course if he was serious about writing. Of all the programmes he looked into, the MSt at Oxford caught his eye.
“It was residence - and retreat - focused,” Prajwal says. “Not having to go to class every week would be nice. That’s how Creative Writing programmes should be.”
SERENDIPITY
But getting into Oxford required an interview. And Oxford interviews are notoriously difficult.
“I wasn’t an English major,” Prajwal says. “I was a communication major and took no English classes. At my school, Writing as Critical Thinking was a mandatory course, and when I realized Professor Carlson, the professor who taught me WACT, was also teaching Creative Writing, I took it – not because I wanted to take a Creative Writing class but because she was an amazing professor.”
So he’d have to do something different to wow the interview committee. How about he attend the London Book Fair? Hilary Mantel was speaking, and if he could casually during the Oxford interview his having attended the Booker Prize winner’s reading , the committee was bound to think he was serious about writing.
To read something on the way to Earl’s Court, where the fair was, he grabbed one of his stories.
“Now why I did that I don’t know,” he says. “Oh, yes, I do, there’s an absolute dearth of good reading material in my sister and brother-in-law’s house.”
At the fair, he sat next to an agent who was unhappy because of the meetings that had been canceled on account of the ashes.
“She definitely wasn’t in a good mood,” Prajwal says. “Imagine looking forward to an event for months only to discover that some of your important meetings are not going to happen.”
The agent, Susan Yearwood at the Susan Yearwood Literary Agency (SYLA), had started her agency two years ago. Prajwal and she got talking, and Prajwal handed her the short story he had brought.
“There was no hope, nothing,” Prajwal says. “Susan later told me that she thought, ‘Oh, great, now I have one more thing to carry after a poor day.”
Prajwal went for his Oxford interview, talked about the London Book Fair and was offered a place to read for a Master of Studies in Creative Writing. Back in India now to attend a cousin’s wedding, he was surprised to discover an e-mail from Susan. She wanted to read more stories.
“Now, that’s when I knew something was going to happen,” Prajwal says. “Something good.”
Prajwal signed a representation agreement with Susan three days before he joined Oxford.
“I hadn’t even approached any other agents,” Prajwal says. “It was a big risk for Susan to take – first of all, this wasn’t anywhere near finished. I was hoping to finish it at Oxford. Second, it was a short-story collection. I wasn’t even aware short-story collections are given the step-daughter treatment in the West.”
Once at Oxford, the revisions started. But six wasn’t a high enough number for a short-story collection. He’d have to write two more stories.
When both Susan and he were satisfied with the final version, Susan circulated the script within her circles. The interest was astounding. Even if someone was reticent about the short-story collection, they badly wanted to have a look at his second book, a novel.
When Jon Riley, the editor in chief of Quercus, called, both Prajwal and Susan knew what they’d do. Prajwal had mentioned to Susan that he had always wanted to be published by Bloomsbury or Quercus, at least in the UK. JK Rowling had done for Bloomsbury what Stieg Larsson had done for Quercus.
Once news spread of his signing, the South Asian press paid Prajwal considerable attention. He was a student. He was 26. He was Indian. He had Nepalese ethnicity. He was a New Yorker. He was educated in America. He was an Oxford student. Kellogg, his college at Oxford, was very enthusiastic.
Prajwal was writing about Nepali-speaking people. The few books about them had been restricted to Nepal. This one was different. He had to remove his Facebook page. The blogosphere speculated.  Rumors started doing the rounds that he was the youngest Indian national to secure a multi-country publishing deal. Just who was this Oxford student?
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Prajwal says. “I know it’s a little crazy. I don’t think I am an excellent writer. I write OK. This hysteria isn’t something we expected.”
The hysteria will also ensure that the sale of the North American rights to his book will be of great interest in publishing circles.
“That will be nice,” Prajwal says. “We are excited about where this is going, but I have stopped reading about myself – someone called me bald and fat in a comment section the other day. It might be time to give up writing in the night and sleeping all day. It might even be time to hit the gym.”