A Life of Crime

Update:

This workshop has been cancelled. Mr Nesser has not been able to make the trip to India thanks to the volcanic ash situation. Here's the official note from the Swedish Embassy:

Owing to the volcanic ash and its repercussions on all things important - like flights in and out of Europe - our visiting author Håkan Nesser is unable to leave Stockholm and has had to cancel his visit to India.

We are really sorry about the inconvenience it would have caused you - but as you do understand, this situation is way beyond any of our control.

You have been very enthusiastic and supporting of the event. A big thanks for that.

The Embassy does look forward to collaborating with you again in the near future… and appeasing the gods of all things that fly – like volcanic ashes and flights.

With Nesser and Lakhe

A workshop presented by the Swedish Embassy in India in association with Caferati.

The workshop will feature an interactive lecture on writing techniques, and focus on honing the skills of the participants in the art of crime fiction writing. The workshop will be led by Håkan Nesser, with Manisha Lakhe.

Håkan Nesser is a Swedish author and teacher who has written a number of successful novels, mostly crime fiction. He has won Best Swedish Crime Novel Award three times, and his novel Carambole won the Glass Key award in 2000. His books have been translated from Swedish into 9 languages. He was born and grew up in Kumla, and has lived most of his adult life in Uppsala. He is a secondary level teacher. His first novel was published in 1988, but he worked as a teacher until 1998 when he became a full-time author, after having become extremely successful as a heavyweight crime writer with his Van Veeteren series. Nesser has published 20 books in Swedish. Four of them have so far been translated to English. They are Borkmann’s Point (2006), The Return (2007), The Mind’s Eye (2008), and Woman with Birthmark (2009). All of these are books in the series about Van Veeteren.
More at his site and his publisher's site.

Manisha Lakhe is a journalist, film critic, poet and writer, and one of Caferati’s founders and moderators. Her first novel The Betelnut Killers, was just release by Random House India. She lives and works in Mumbai.
More at her site and her publisher's site.

The basics
Date: 24th April
Time: 10.30 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. (with a one-hour break for lunch)
Venue: Conference Room, Pinstorm Technologies, Ground floor, Swati, North Avenue, Santacruz West, Mumbai 400054
The workshop is free, but limited seats available. Registration is compulsory.
To register, send (1) a short - 100 words or so - introductory paragraph about yourself and (2) a short crime fiction story (or an extract from a longer work) to caferati AT gmail DOT com with the subject line “A Life of Crime With Nesser and Lakhe” by 6.00pm IST, 22nd April 2010.

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Mr Nesser will be conducting similar workshops in Delhi and Bangalore, we're told. Caferati isn't involved in organising those, but we will certainly support them by passing the word around and encouraging our members to join in.