Priya Basil

Priya Basil (born 1977 in London, England) is a British author and political activist. Her work has been translated into over half a dozen languages, and her first novel was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. She is the co-founder of Authors for Peace and an initiator of the movement Writers Against Mass Surveillance.

Writing
Her first novel, Ishq and Mushq, was published in 2007. Ishq and Mushq is a family saga which illuminates the problem of cultural identity for immigrants over several generations, and raises questions of memory, exile and self-rediscovery. Ishq and Mushq came second in the World Book Day "Book to Talk About 2008" competition. The novel was also short-listed for a Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award.

Her second novel, The Obscure Logic of the Heart, was published in June 2010. It tells the love story between the Muslim Lina and the secular Kenyan architecture student, Anil. The characters are caught in the maelstrom of socio-political problems as they try to negotiate between different loyalties – to family, faith, society and themselves.

Priya's novella Strangers on the 16:02 is published on 17 February 2011.

Basil’s work has been translated into Italian, German, Russian, Bulgarian, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Croatian, and Serbian.

In autumn 2014, Priya Basil took up the prestigious Writers' Lectureship at the University of Tübingen. She shared the honour with Chika Unigwe. Taiye Selasi, and Nii Ayikwei Parkes also gave supporting lectures.

Basil's other writings have been published in The Guardian, and the Asia Literary Review, She is a regular contributor to Lettre International, the leading German-language literary magazine. Her themes include art, Europe, democracy, migration and (neo-)colonialism.

Political work
In 2010, Priya co-founded Authors for Peace. with the journalist Matthias Fredrich-Auf der Horst. It is intended to be a platform from which writers can actively use literature in different ways to promote peace. The first event by Authors for Peace took place on 21 September 2010, the UN's International Day of Peace. With the support of the International Literature Festival Berlin, Priya hosted a 24hour-live-online-reading by 80 authors from all over the world. The authors read from their work in a gesture of solidarity with those who are oppressed or caught in conflict.

In September 2013, Basil signed the German novelist Juli Zeh's Open Letter to Angela Merkel. The letter criticizes Merkel's reaction to the Snowden revelations and demands a more robust response. Priya Basil read this letter aloud in public on the opening day of the International Literature Festival Berlin, as part of the festival's 'Berlin Liest' (Berlin Reads) initiative. Later, she helped organize, and took part in the anti-surveillance protest action 'March on the Chancellory', led by Zeh on 18 September 2013.

Basil is also one of the initiators of 'Writers Against Mass Surveillance', a worldwide movement against mass surveillance that was launched on 10 December 2013. Basil is one of the group of seven international writers who wrote the appeal, gathered the first 560 signatures from world-famous writers, and organized the global launch of the appeal. The other initiators are Juli Zeh, Ilija Trojanow, Eva Menasse, Janne Teller, Isabel Cole and Josef Haslinger. The appeal was published through exclusive deals with leading newspapers in more than thirty countries worldwide, for example in Germany the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and is also an online pledge at Change.org which the general public can sign.

Basil continues to be active against mass surveillance. She spoke at Re:publica Berlin 2014, and has published essays and articles about the threat mass surveillance poses to democracy and individual freedom, including in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Tagesspiegel and the Danish newspaper Politiken.

BücherFrauen, a co-operation of 800 Women from the German Publishing Industry, puts forward an annual list of female candidates for the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In 2013, 2014 and 2015 Priya Basil was one of the 20-odd recommended writers on a list which included Hannah Arendt, Arundhati Roy, Nawal El Saadawi, Herta Müller and Juli Zeh.

In 2017 Priya Basil, together with Ulrich Schreiber, conceptualized and co-curated the International Congress for Freedom and Democracy, which took place from 8–10 September 2017 as part of the International Literature Festival Berlin.

Basil has written extensively on Europe and the future of the European Union, and has argued about the need for an official European public holiday across all member states. In 2017 she launched a campaign, which includes a petition on change.org, for the establishment of such a day. In 2018, at the invitation of Sonja Longolius and Janika Gelinek, directors of the Literaturhaus Berlin, she curates A European Holiday! – an event intended not just as a cultural extravaganza but as a political intervention – another step towards making the idea of such a day reality.

Personal life
Priya grew up in Kenya, returning to the UK to study English literature at the University of Bristol. She had a brief career in advertising before becoming a full-time writer.

Basil now lives in Berlin. Wired called her "a British, Kenyan, Indian, German-resident fiction-writer. Priya is another of those contemporary novelists whose life wouldn't do within a novel, because it's simply too implausible".