Katherine Russell Rich | Granta

Katherine Russell Rich

Katherine Russell Rich is the author of Dreaming in Hindi: Life in Translation, and the award-winning memoir The Red Devil: To Hell with Cancer and Back. Her writing appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Salon, and O, the Oprah Magazine and she taught writing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She died in 2012. http://www.katherinerussellrich.com/

Publications

Dreaming In Hindi

Katherine Russell Rich

Having survived a serious illness and reached an impasse in her career, Katherine Russell Rich spontaneously accepts a freelance assignment in India, where she finds herself utterly overwhelmed by the place and the language. Before she knows it she is on her way to Udaipur, a city in Rajasthan, to live with a local family and join a special language school offering ‘total immersion’. What follows is a year of linguistic adventure and cultural surprises in which Rich gradually sheds her foreignness, to discover a new country and a new way of communicating. Both a clever, lucid and funny memoir, and a unique investigation into the science of language acquisition, Dreaming in Hindi offers an engrossing account of what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.