Here and Hereafter

How does a writer come to be? Discipline and perseverance count, but so does a particular kind of sensibility. Vineet Gill sets out to understand that sensibility in the life and work of Nirmal Verma, one of the pioneers of Hindi literature, and finds that the personal and the literary cannot be pulled apart.

Gill treats the scattered pieces of Verma's life as the raw material of the writer. The places he lived, the people he knew and the books he read all, in Gill's view, show up again in the stories and novels.

The book is a close reader's study and a reflective excavation of Verma's body of work, considering its place in world literature.