We publish a Literature Newsletter when we have news and features on UK and international literature, plus opportunities for the industry to share. Wow, I really loved this book. All the way through, except for the very beginning, which now in retrospect I think was good. I was going to give the book four stars. By the end, I realized I had come to know Sophia so very well and I liked her so very much that I simply had to give the book five stars. I was happy that the author focused on Princess Sophia Alexandra Duleep Singh (1876 – 1948), even though any of the siblings could have been the focus of a book. Anand’s skill is to bring to life a character whose name does not figure in the annals of the suffragette movement. “Despite her best and repeated efforts, Sophia never managed to be sent to prison, and therefore was denied her chance to go on hunger strike and her place in the pantheon,” she writes. In the strangest twist of all, she concludes: “Not even when she threw herself at the prime minister’s car would the police and courts punish her as they punished others of lower rank.” Such were the intolerable burdens of class.

Anand married science writer Simon Singh in 2007. The couple have two sons and live in Richmond, London. [17] [18] She opened the 2014 Kolkata Book Fair and has also appeared at the Jaipur Literature Festival, most recently in January 2015.Dalrymple, William; Anand, Anita (2017). Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond. Bloomsbury Publishing, ISBN 978-1-63557-076-2. In 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was born into royalty. Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs, a realm that stretched from the lush Kashmir Valley to the craggy foothills of the Khyber Pass and included the mighty cities of Lahore and Peshawar. It was a territory irresistible to the British, who plundered everything, including the fabled Koh-I-Noor diamond. Sophia is the sort of remarkable, almost unbelievable untold true story that every writer dreams of chancing upon. A wonderful debut, written with real spirit and gusto. Anita Anand has produced a winner Museum of Richmond exhibition: Celebrating 800 years of St Mary Magdalene at the heart of Richmond". Richmond Local History Society. July 2019 . Retrieved 8 August 2021. Although Sophia was involved in a number of causes during her life, I was left with the feeling that her passionate nature resulted in her being caught up in the causes of others rather than those that might have been her own choice without their influence, and that on some level she was used by them. Less emphasis was put on her work on behalf of Indian soldiers and the lascars, although these seemed to be causes that were not unique to her, but ones which she chose without undue influence.

Manages to relate the complicated, fascinating and historically significant story of this woman’s life whilst being as easy to read as any novel. Well done! Sophia’s letters are gone, but the author has found people who lived with her during the Second World War, evacuees and children and the housemaid. What they have to say is revealing. The book covers the entire lives of all the family members. Sophia was especially awesome. I like that she got involved in activism in her 30's. I like how she used her class privilege/ princess status to get more attention for women's rights.Whenever I go to vote, I cry. The thought of the women who came before me and fought for what I have now, moves me to tears. Reading the legacy of Princess Sophia Duleep Singh and her place in the fight, brought it all the more close to my heart. Anand has also written articles for India Today and The Asian Age newspaper, and used to write a regular column in The Guardian ("Anita Anand's Diary", 2004–2005 [10] [11]). Sophia and her sisters were able to get to India as adults. The experience of meeting people fighting for Indian independence awoke the political consciousness of Sophia. She returned to England and threw herself into the fight of Women's Suffrage in the 1910s.

The part of the book I found the most touching was a memory of the daughter of the elderly Princess' housekeeper. The United Kingdom's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. This is fiction, but it's loosely based on things that have happened in the past. It's about this woman whose body is found after this big party on a little fictional island in West Cork. It's uncomfortable to read but compulsive - you can't put it down. I absolutely devoured it. This young girl's body is found and no one's ever arrested, but there's this understanding that the small community know who did it. And then 10 years later, this film crew comes along to make a documentary about the murder and it all kind of unravels. My father proudly worked for the British army as a budget manager in the UK and Germany, but years later was held at gunpoint in an attempted robbery. “Go home” was spat at him. The injustice of my dad spending decades working for his country only to be told he didn’t belong, boiled my blood. It’s been on something of a gentle simmer since. Princess Sophia’s father went through the wringer himself. His former kingdom brought a chunk of wealth to the British empire, yet in Britain, a country he was kept in against his will, he was labelled an ineligible bachelor. Though women defied convention to flirt with him, no noble family would accept his proposal of marriage – he was regarded as coming from an inferior race. Anand, Anita (2015). Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1408835456.It turned out to not be very hard to dig up unusual information on Singh. “People didn’t know anything about her. Everything was new. And I was very happy to find people who were still alive who had known her,” Anand says. “Those people brought to life what I was learning in dusty files and once-classified documents in British archives. Those people made her real.” Anand in her latest book uncovers not just an intriguing female life, but also an important perspective on British-Indian colonial history ... Fresh and well written ... What a story, and what a successful telling of it * The Times * On 18 November 2005, Anand won the Nazia Hassan Award for 2005 in the category of Upcoming Television Broadcasters. [14] [15] Her book The Patient Assassin won the 2020 Hessell-Tiltman Prize. [16] Personal life [ edit ]

Sophia is the sort of remarkable, almost unbelievable untold true story that every writer dreams of chancing upon. A wonderful debut, written with real spirit and gusto. Anita Anand has produced a winner' William Dalrymple John Kampfner is author of The Rich, From Slaves to Super Yachts, a 2,000-Year History, published by Little Brown.It was an appropriate place to begin, because Anand, an experienced political journalist, knows the parliamentary scene well. There may also be a degree of identification between author and subject. Both were born in London but with family history from the same part of India; as Anand remarked in an online interview with Gargi Gupta, "she was Punjabi, as am I". She further explained that her own interest in Sophia originated in a 1913 photograph of her selling The Suffragette newspaper outside Hampton Court (where the princess lived in a royal grace-and-favour house, much to the chagrin of the authorities as her activism increased). In researching the book, Anand drew upon the papers of Sophia’s father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, as well as intelligence and police records detailing links with suffragettes and Indian nationalist leaders. By a nice irony, she pointed out, it was the very thoroughness of British bureaucracy that enabled Sophia’s story to be fully told for the first time (www.dnaindia.com 18 January 2015). Miss Anand writes extremely well. Whilst it is clear that she respects and admires her subject, her writing does not appear to me to be sycophantic; certainly, Sophia is not presented as a paragon of virtue but as committed, caring but sometimes a little eccentric and irascible individual seeking a role in life in a country determined to deny her one. In 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was born into Indian royalty. Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs, one of the greatest empires of the Indian subcontinent, a realm that stretched from the lush Kashmir Valley to the craggy foothills of the Khyber Pass and included the mighty cities of Lahore and Peshawar. It was a territory irresistible to the British, who plundered everything, including the fabled Koh-I-Noor diamond. After his death, the British used the confusion surrounding his heirs' succession to move into the area. Most of the adult heirs died suspiciously. When it was over, the ruler of this prosperous area was an 1o year old boy, Duleep. His mother was very politically astute so the British had her exiled from the country and then forced the child-king to sign over his lands and the symbol of his rule, the Kor-i-Noor diamond. What do you do if you are the daughter of an estranged Indian royal family marooned in the heart of late-Victorian and Edwardian London? You join the ranks of the various revolutionaries and other assorted malcontents, while maintaining social proprieties to the very end.