Rajesh Parameswaran
India/USA | 2015, 2017
Rajesh Parameswaran was born in India (Chennai) and moved to the USA as a child. He is a fiction writer and author of short stories that have appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope: All-Story and Fiction. His collection I am an executioner: love stories (2012) was one of the Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Fiction for that year. The story “The strange career of Doctor Raju Gopalarajan” was one of the three stories for which McSweeney‘s won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 2007, and it was included in The Best American Magazine Writing and in The United States of McSweeney’s: Ten Years of Accidental Classics. Rajesh lives in New York.
“The studio in the top of the tower at the Santa Maddalena Foundation is probably the most serene, beautiful and inspiring room in which I’ve ever worked. Outside, there is the ever-changing light over the olive trees and the valley. Inside, there are the carefully chosen and beautiful objects, furnishings and artworks, including an elegant, grand old desk that is probably hundreds of years old (I tried not to think about it, lest I become afraid to use it); a massive hand-painted bureau; and a grand daybed with a festive patchwork canopy. I asked Beatrice how the room had been built. The tower had been resurrected from a crumbling ruin. The massive bureau had been lowered by pulley from above, before the roof was in place, because it wouldn’t fit through the door. This perfect room was an arduous, highly intricate, and visionary undertaking–something only Beatrice could have, or would have, attempted. The effect is timeless, beautiful, and perfectly conducive to writing. I am so grateful for my time there, and to have benefited from Beatrice’s vision.”