Ajay Chowdhury's Blog

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Well, it’s been an exhausting month and I needed my Diwali sweets to recover.

After a year of work, Dog Mom finished its four-week run at Southwark Playhouse last weekend. More than a thousand people came to see it and seemed to love it. And then, suddenly, it was over.

That’s the strange thing about theatre. A book stays on the shelf, a film can be watched again, music can be re-listened to, a painting re-looked at. A play disappears. Whenever a production I’ve directed ends, there’s a particular sadness that takes a while to shake off.

I attended virtually every performance. Listening to an audience laugh, control their sobs or fall completely silent as the actors tell the story is an extraordinary feeling. You find yourself thinking: We did this! We made these people feel something!

I suspect that’s why many of us create things. It’s certainly why I do.

Here is a taster of what the show was like…

There hasn’t been much time to dwell on Dog Mom since I’ve started a new book. I can’t say much about it yet, except that it isn’t a Kamil novel, which brings its own complications.

Returning to Kamil and Anjoli feels like visiting family members. With a new cast, I’m at sea. Who are these people? What are their lives like? Why should I care about them?

At the moment, I have a situation, some protagonists and the outline of a plot. What I don’t quite have is my way into the story. It’s exciting and frustrating in roughly equal measure. I know there’s something in there, but I haven’t worked out how to get at it. A sculptor must feel the same when faced with a block of marble and has to chip away at the bits that aren’t the statue.

This is not my favourite stage of the writing process. Once I’m properly under way, the writing develops its own momentum and I get into flow. Right now, I can go in almost any direction, which mostly means I spend a lot of time wondering whether I’ve chosen the right one.

Still, I trust that it will come together. It has for the last ten books.

Somewhere in all this, I also wrote a couple of newspaper articles you might enjoy.

The Patriot is published tomorrow, and the usual pre-publication jitters have arrived.

I started writing it in August 2024. After more than two years of writing, redrafting and editing, it feels slightly unreal that you’ll finally be able to pick it up from a bookshop shelf.

The overlapping timelines of a writer’s life don’t help. While writing The Patriot, I finished Eden Falls. While editing it, I wrote the next Kamil novel, The Outsider. Sometimes the books all mush together in my head, and I have to remind myself which characters are which – it sometimes gets confusing when I am talking about the books at events.

But enough angst. Here I am discussing The Patriot with Philippa Hall on the Quick Book Reviews podcast.

The Patriot has already had some lovely reviews, including this one from the wonderful Natasha Cooper in Literary Review.

And here’s what some fellow writers have said:

“An absolute roller-coaster of a read. A must-read book. I loved Detective Kamil and PI Anjoli Chatterjee. The characterisation in this story is second to none.” - Liz Nugent.

“An absolute bloody tour-de-force.” – Imran Mahmood

‘What a ride! Ajay Chowdhury packs in colonialism, state-sponsored theft, centuries of history, contemporary corruption and cold blooded murder into this pacy, ingeniously crafted mystery. A wonderful read that you’ll want to go on and on. I loved it.’ - Graham Bartlett

The Patriot: read an exclusive extract

The Patriot: pre-order your copy

I’ve also added something new to my website: Anjoli Chatterjee’s history of Brick Lane. Take a look around her neighbourhood and let me know what you think.

Explore Anjoli Chatterjee’s Brick Lane

And a lovely moment for Eden Falls: it reached number one on Amazon’s techno-thrillers chart. Thank you to everyone who’s bought it, read it or recommended it to a friend.

Eden Falls: learn more and order

It’s also been a busy month of festivals, bookshops and conversations.

At the East Riding Festival of Words, M. J. Arlidge, Nick Quantrill and I talked about writing, politics and, inevitably, AI.

At West Drayton Litfest, I gave a solo talk about my writing career. Facing an audience without another author to turn to was slightly nerve-wracking, but everyone was so welcoming that it soon felt like a conversation.

Paul Waters and I compared writing processes at the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town, and Jo Callaghan and I traded stories at the first Sandwell Library Crime Day.

Thank you to everyone who came along, asked a question or stopped to say hello. Writing involves an awful lot of sitting alone in a room, and these conversations are a welcome reminder of who’s on the other side of the page.

With Matt Arlidge and Nick Quantrill

With Jo Callahan

Signing books at Goldsboro

18 November – Manchester Crime Central with Paul Burke and Adam Simcox

If you’re coming, do say hello.

Event details and tickets

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Soho Place. One of my favourite plays - excellent production.

Dog Mom at Southwark Playhouse. Saw it sixteen times. In my defence, I did direct it.

The Diplomat on Netflix. Superb – oh, the ending of that final episode….

Slow Horses on Apple TV – fab as always. Great to see Mick Herron and his wife, Jo, as mourners in the church sitting next to Lady Di and Jackson Lamb.

Colin from Accounts and Dog Park – 2 hilarious Aussie shows that got my juices flowing for Dog Mom.

Cooked a Kabuli lamb pulao. A delicious Afghan rice dish - my contribution to the month that didn’t involve a fictional character. Get the recipe.

Happy Diwali all. Until next month,

Ajay

Find me online: ajaychowdhury.com | X: @ajaychow

Instagram / Facebook / Threads: @ajaychowdhury.author | LinkedIn: ajaychowdhury1

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Well, we’re two weeks into rehearsals for Dog Mom, opening night is ten days away, and panic is in the air. However much I tell myself this is normal (it’s happened with pretty much every play I’ve directed), it doesn’t stop the churning in my gut.

For me, co-creation is a complicated process. When I write a book, I have control. I know the message I want to convey; it’s a question of telling the story in the right way to make readers feel it and live it. Directing a play is different because although I’m still working out how to tell the story, it’s someone else’s story, not mine.

On one occasion, I didn’t figure that out until after the run was long over. Decades ago, I directed Ibsens When We Dead Awaken, thinking it was about one thing. Only years later did I realise I’d completely missed the point. Being young and romantic, I had treated the piece as a tragedy of lost love, when in reality it is a deeply philosophical play about a man regretting never having truly lived.

In addition, when I’m directing, not only am I working on how to tell someone else’s story, but I’m doing it with a group of brilliant actors who may have different views of what the play is about.

So we talk, experiment, and try things out. My job is to identify what’s working and what isn’t, which is harder than it sounds. One day, the cast might be in flow, and the play will come alive in the rehearsal room. The next, the same scene might feel completely inert, even though they’re doing and saying exactly the same things. Then we have to rewind and find the characters again, hoping to recapture that magic.

The one constant is that life on stage (and often on the page) comes from the interactions between characters, rather than any preconceived ideas I may have as a director or writer. An actor sees the world through their character’s eyes, just as I see it through Kamil’s and Anjoli’s to be true to their natures. I’ve never written an omniscient narrator, and I’m not sure I’d know how. It feels too removed from the action.

A wonderful book on this topic is The Actor and the Space by Declan Donellan, Artistic Director of Cheek by Jowl, a brilliant theatre company on whose board I have the privilege to serve. I find the book as helpful for writing the characters in my novels as it is for tips on how to direct them on stage.

In ten days, we’ll add the last complication: an audience. They’ll laugh in places we didn’t expect and fall silent in others, and we’ll discover a few more things about the play we thought we knew. That’s part of what keeps me coming back to directing, despite the tummy-rumbles. There’s always the possibility that a roomful of people will find something in the story that I couldn’t have found on my own. I’d just like to experience one full night’s sleep before we get there.

Trailer for Dog Mom

DOG MOM AT SOUTHWARK PLAYHOUSE

DOG MOM is a funny and moving new play set in New York City about a reluctant dog owner whose pooch philosophises, analyses her - and swears at cats! There’s a lot to laugh at, but at its heart, the play is about starting again and letting someone get close when that’s the last thing you think you want.

Book tickets and find out more

Eden Falls feels weirdly more prescient with every new round of doom-mongering about AI. For a thoughtful and sobering outlook on the very real dangers, listen to Bill Gates on this podcast.

Eden Falls: learn more and order

My new Kamil Rahman book, The Patriot, is out in November, and the early reviews are looking good. It’s always a nail-biting moment when they arrive: the book is finally in the hands of real readers.

“An absolute roller-coaster of a read. A must-read book. I loved Detective Kamil and PI Anjoli Chatterjee. The characterisation in this story is second to none.” - Liz Nugent.

The Patriot: read an exclusive extract

The Patriot: pre-order your copy

I’ve also added a new section to my website: Anjoli Chatterjee’s history of Brick Lane. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Explore Anjoli Chatterjee’s Brick Lane

It’s been a busy stretch of festivals and events. At St Hilda’s Crime Weekend, I gave a ‘lecture’ on AI as the Anti-Hero with Jo Callahan. At Bloody Scotland, I joined Carys Green, Doug Johnstone and Lilja Sigurdardottir for a panel called ‘The Algorithm Did It’.

Other highlights included The Word is Murder in South Shields with Emma Styles and Zoe Rankin, Bedford Library with Gary Wright and Remi Kone, and the East Riding Festival of Words with M J Arlidge.

Fan-boying with the amazing Tana French

A murder of crime writers at St Hilda’s

Signing books at Foyles

3 October – East Riding Festival of Words in Beverley

6 October – Owl Bookshop with Paul Waters, Kentish Town, London

9 October – West Drayton Litfest, Southlands Art Centre

25 October – Sandwell Library

If you’re coming to any of these, do say hello.

Event details and tickets

· My Neighbour Totoro at Gillian Lynne Theatre – super-spectacular! Go for the Catbus.

· Electra/Persona at the National – riveting performances.

· The Oresteia at The Bridge – one of the best things I’ve seen all year. Succession meets Greek tragedy.

· Man on Man at the Royal Court – okay, I didn’t love this one. Too harrowing for me.

· Tartuffe (Remixed) at Marylebone Theatre – good fun, set in a Nigerian/West Indian home.

· Neagley on Amazon Prime.

· A delicious Filipino chicken adobo! Get the recipe.

Until next month,

Ajay

Find me online: ajaychowdhury.com | X: @ajaychow

Instagram / Facebook / Threads: @ajaychowdhury.author | LinkedIn: ajaychowdhury1

Diary of a Doggie Director: Rehearsals begin today for Dog Mom... have to admit I'm nervous. Three weeks of rehearsals with an amazing cast and crew and then it will be ready (we hope) to be unleashed on the world. This is one of the most exciting times to be a director - I have a few hunches of what I want but we'll see where the actors take us as we co-create the production... scary and exhilarating times...https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/dog-mom/

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I’ve been directing plays for more than forty years, but writing crime thrillers for only six. I still can’t quite believe that, in that time, I’ve published seven books. Someone pinch me. Gently, please - I have deadlines.

The last play I directed was more than a decade ago. It was a South Asian version of The Merchant of Venice called The Merchant of Vembley. Yes, with a V.

After that, I more or less decided to concentrate on writing. My theatrical days were behind me.

Been there. Loved it. Done it.

So it was extremely annoying to read a new play called Dog Mom, by Tate Hanyok, and fall completely in love with it.

I already had two books coming out this year - Eden Falls and The Patriot - and I was finishing the next Kamil book, The Outsider, due in 2027. Where on earth was I supposed to find the time to direct a play?

But the script kept nagging at me.

Dog Mom is about a recently divorced woman in her fifties who is absolutely not a dog person - and what happens when a golden retriever decides to adopt her. It is laugh-out-loud funny, deeply moving and, I think, exactly what people need in these febrile times.

So I took the bone between my teeth and went for it.

I’ve spent the past several months casting the play, securing a venue (the wonderful Southwark Playhouse in London), assembling a production team and doing all the things I’d almost forgotten how to do. Some came back immediately. Some I had to dig for.

At the same time, I’ve had to keep working on the new Kamil book because, well, deadlines are deadlines. This has brought something fascinating into sharp focus: the differences, and unexpected similarities, between directing and writing.

Some differences are obvious. Writing is largely a solitary activity, at least until the manuscript is handed to an editor. Directing is intensely collaborative. Everyone is responsible for a crucial part of the production, and if any one of us fluffs it, the whole thing can wobble. No pressure, then.

But the similarities are more interesting.

Whether I’m creating something for the page or the stage, what ultimately matters is its effect on the reader or audience. And that effect is something we create together.

I can put words on a page or direct actors on a stage, but the real power of the piece comes from the imagination of the person experiencing it. They have to participate. They have to fill in the gaps.

The best plays achieve this through what is left unsaid. The subtext. And while writing my new book, I realised that the best novels do exactly the same thing.

One challenge of writing a series is deciding how much to tell readers about what has gone before. It is important to me that every Kamil book works as a standalone, but new readers can understandably be flummoxed about who everyone is and how they are connected.

I keep explanations to a minimum and trust readers to pick up what they need from the subtext. Nobody wants to feel as though they’ve arrived late to a party and must sit through a presentation on everyone else’s family history before being offered a drink.

Creating for both page and stage brings me enormous joy. An idea begins in one person’s imagination and is transformed into something that can reach thousands of others, making them laugh, moving them and, with any luck, making them think.

That’s why I do what I do.

And apparently, despite my best intentions, why I’m directing plays again.

DOG MOM AT SOUTHWARK PLAYHOUSE
Book tickets and find out more

Eden Falls has launched to lovely reviews, and it was wonderful to be picked as Read of the Month by the Crime Writer’s Association.

Eden Falls: learn more and order

My new Kamil Rahman book, The Patriot, is out in November, and the early reviews are already looking good. It is always a nail-biting moment when they arrive because now the book is finally in the hands of real readers.

“An absolute roller-coaster of a read. A must-read book. I loved Detective Kamil and PI Anjoli Chatterjee. The characterisation in this story is second to none.” - Liz Nugent

The Patriot: read an exclusive extract

The Patriot: pre-order your copy

I’ve also added a new section to my website: Anjoli Chatterjee’s history of Brick Lane. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Explore Anjoli Chatterjee’s Brick Lane

The big event this month was Bute Noir, one of my favourite festivals. I joined Gavin Bell, Ilona Bannister and Colin Sinclair for a panel, Thrillers and Killers, and took part in a fun and totally barmy quiz. Our team came second (out of two).

With the brilliant Liz Nugent

Bute Noir’s gloriously chaotic quiz with Luca Veste, Harriet Tyce, Heather Fitt, Craig Robertson, Gavin Bell, Erin Kelly and Gary Wright

Signing copies of Eden Falls after the launch - one of my favourite things to do

3 September - Hertford Library

5 September - St Hilda’s Crime Fiction Weekend, Oxford

19 September - Bloody Scotland, Stirling

26 September - The Word is Murder, South Shields

If you’re there, do come and say hello.

Event details and tickets

· The Tao of Glass at Soho Place - spectacular!

· How the Other Half Loves at the Old Vic - good fun.

· A lovely long weekend in Scotland, on the Black Isle near Cromarty.

· The new Reacher on Amazon Prime.

· Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan - riveting and fury-provoking.

Until next month,

Ajay

Find me online: ajaychowdhury.com | X: @ajaychow

Instagram / Facebook / Threads: @ajaychowdhury.author | LinkedIn: ajaychowdhury1

Sign up to receive my newsletter every month – featuring news, recommendations, writing tips, giveaways, and book extracts.

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My new standalone novel, Eden Falls, was published earlier this month. The thrill of seeing a book you have envisioned and worked on for years finally on the shelves never gets old, and I was blown away to see this review.

This book was great fun to research, and I now know a lot more than when I started about American road trips, quantum physics, and the dark side of AI.

My wife and I travelled to the US and visited Princeton and Washington, DC - two of the novel’s principal locations (sadly didn’t make it to New Orleans or Hawaii – next time). Once there, I sought out real places where scenes could unfold. I enjoy using actual restaurants, streets and landmarks for veracity – in fact, after finding a café called Say Cheese, I found out my cousin knows the owner!

I happen upon fun coincidences a lot in my writing. Serendipity plays a large part, too. I had always wanted a climactic scene to take place at the tomb of Marie Laveau, the legendary New Orleans voodoo priestess. Then, while researching it, I discovered that Nicolas Cage had built a white pyramid as his future mausoleum in the same cemetery. Well, that was far too delicious not to include.

Researching the scary consequences of increased AI adoption required rather less travel, as hardly a week goes by without reading about some major autonomous breach. Just this month, OpenAI revealed that some of its most advanced models had broken out of a controlled environment during a security test and compromised the systems of the AI start-up Hugging Face. I also read a terrifying book called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, which informed some of the speculation in the novel. Although I set Eden Falls a few years from now, the future seems to be racing towards us far faster than even I expected.

For meteorites and quantum physics, I turned to experts like Professor Graham Woan of Glasgow University. He and others patiently educated me in the science, after which I had to distil what I had learned into something that served the story. Eden Falls is, after all, a thriller, not a textbook. The challenge was to convey the essence of these complex subjects without baffling or boring my readers.

Perhaps, the real pleasure of researching a novel is following roads you never expected to travel, discovering connections you couldn’t have invented and then hiding all that hard work inside a story that, and this is the crucial part, keeps you turning the pages.

To learn more and order: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/474264/eden-falls-by-chowdhury-ajay/9781787305496.

In other news…

2026 has been a busy year, and it’s getting busier.

My new Kamil Rahman book, The Patriot, is out in November. The early reviews are also looking good. It’s always a nail-biting moment when they arrive: the book is finally in the hands of real readers.

To learn more and pre-order: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/468817/the-patriot-by-chowdhury-ajay/9781787305052

I’m also directing my first play in ten years at Southwark Playhouse in London. It’s the UK premiere of Dog Mom, a comedy about a recently divorced woman in her fifties who is absolutely not a dog person, and how she copes when a golden retriever decides to adopt her. We had our first Zoom rehearsal this month, and it is shaping up well.

Find out more and book your tickets for a fun night out here: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/dog-mom/

Events

The big event this month was the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at Harrogate. It was great meeting so many readers. I took part in a fun panel called Whatever Happened to all the Serial Killers with Clare Mackintosh, Sue Black, Vaseem Khan and Gary Wright. I also sat on panels at the Newark Book Festival and the Hemsworth Library with Gary Wright and Matt Arlidge, who were great fun to chat with.

The man with Absolute Power…. giving the amazing David Baldacci a copy of Eden Falls

Ah, go on, go on, go on… meeting Ardal O’Hanlon

Little and large… with the brilliant Antti Tuomainen

Coming up this August:

I will be at Bute Noir from August 7-9. Do come and say hello if you’re there.

Event details and tickets are available here:

https://ajaychowdhury.com/events/

Things I loved this month

· High & Low by Amanda Craig - a brilliant state of the nation novel.

· Billion Dollar Brain by Len Deighton – the best sardonic narrator ever written.

· Black Comedy at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond

· Watching Toy Story 5 with my daughter – seeing Pixar together has been a ritual for two decades

Competition

Congratulations to Donna Dickens for winning the earlier competition.

If you’d like to win a signed copy of a Kamil Rahman book of your choice, please sign up for my newsletter and answer the following question:

What is the name of Anjoli’s restaurant?

Please email your answer to ajay@ajaychowdhury.com with the subject line “Kamil Competition” and which Kamil book you’d like if you win by August 31st.

Until next month,

Ajay

My website is ajaychowdhury.com

I’m also on

X: @ajaychow

Instagram: @ajaychowdhury.author

Facebook: @ajaychowdhury.author

LinkedIn: ajaychowdhury1

Threads: @ajaychowdhury.author

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Hi and welcome to my first ever free newsletter! I plan to publish it monthly and talk about topics of the day (eg the use of AI in the arts) as well as writing tips, competitions, giveaways, exclusive book extracts and so on. Please do sign up here:

https://linktr.ee/AjayChowdhury

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I’ve been debating whether to do one for quite a while, unsure whether readers would really be interested in my thoughts on writing, the worrying state of technology, and the arts in general. But then something happened on June 12th that I think will seriously affect our world, so I decided to share a few thoughts.

For the first time in human history, a person became a trillionaire.

Elon Musk, after the flotation of SpaceX.

Now, on the face of it, this might prompt a collective shrug of the shoulders. Rich man gets even richer. So what? But I think it has serious ramifications.

First, let’s look at the difference between a million and a trillion. We’re so used to hearing these numbers being bandied about that they’ve almost lost their meaning. Big bucks. Bigger bucks. Absurdly bigger bucks.

So let me frame it differently.

A million seconds is around twelve days.

A trillion seconds is almost thirty-two thousand years.

Or, in a more physical example – if you stacked a trillion dollars worth of a hundred dollar bills together they would stretch from London to Verona!

That is the scale we are talking about.

So Elon Musk’s wealth now dwarfs that of every other individual on the planet. This worries me, not just because of the sheer level of income inequality, which has been getting worse for decades, but because I don’t believe this level of wealth was remotely merited.

I’m sure Musk is a smart guy, but in my view, this fortune has been largely ‘earned’ through sheer crony capitalism, specifically his closeness to the current US government.

Musk has presided over many, many failures: Hyperloop, Neuralink, Twitter/X, SolarCity. And three genuine successes: Tesla, Starlink and SpaceX. Now, you may say he shoots for the stars and some things are bound to fail, and there is some truth in that. But his companies have also succeeded because they received vast amounts of support and funding from the US government, something that appears to have accelerated as he has grown closer to Donald Trump.

And Musk has responded by going in and slashing funding to the world’s poorest people, putting organisations like USAID ‘through the woodchipper’.

It is my dislike of this man that helped shape the antagonist of my new thriller, Eden Falls.

Markus Noel is a charismatic trillionaire. I set the novel in the near future because I thought it would be years before we actually had a trillionaire. Clearly, I was not imaginative enough.

Noel has created an AI assistant called Manx, which effectively runs our lives for us: managing our day-to-day affairs, freeing us to focus on what makes us truly happy.

Or so it claims.

Because, slowly, Manx begins to take over. As Noel puts it in Eden Falls:

“In the coming months, every one of you will either be instructing a machine or taking instructions from one. So, I’m going to let you into a little secret.” He lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper. “You’re redundant. You all have a choice. Embrace Manx or pick a profession AI will not replace. Become a hairdresser. A ski instructor. A plumber. A sewage worker. Because that’s all your coveted MBA will be good for. To clean up other people’s shit.”

You can learn more about the book and pre-order it here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/474264/eden-falls-by-chowdhury-ajay/9781787305496.

Been lucky to get some great feedback from others writers and pre-readers.

‘A clever, timely and thrilling page turner’ Jo Callaghan

‘Outstanding’ Abir Mukherjee

‘A first-rate thriller’ William Shaw

‘Pulsating’ Vaseem Khan

In other news…

2026 has been a busy year, and it’s getting busier.

In addition to Eden Falls, which is published in July, my new Kamil Rahman book, The Patriot, is out in November. I still can’t quite believe it’s the sixth in the series.

In this one, Kamil and Anjoli are inadvertently drawn into the orbit of a rogue historian who plans to steal the Koh-i-Noor diamond from the Tower of London. I’ve always wanted to write a heist novel, and this was great fun to research and write. Rififiis a brilliant heist movie, by the way. Do watch it if you haven’t already.

Read an exclusive extract from The Patriot and buy it here:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/discover/articles/extract-the-patriot

I’m also editing the next Kamil, which is out next year. Kamil and Anjoli go to New York for an uber-posh wedding, which is then derailed by a murder. I’ve always been a big fan of The Bonfire of the Vanities, and I wanted to contrast the lives of two immigrants in today’s America: one undocumented and trying to evade ICE, the other a crypto-billionaire living in the penthouse of Manhattan’s tallest building. I look forward to seeing what you think.

The Shadow was shortlisted for the Eastern Eye crime novel of the year, 2026.

I’m also directing my first play in ten years at Southwark Playhouse in London. It’s the UK premiere of Dog Mom, a comedy about a recently divorced woman in her fifties who is absolutely not a dog person, and how she copes when a golden retriever decides to adopt her.

Learn more here and do come if it strikes a chord.

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/dog-mom/

Events

I’ve just finished several events – Alibis in the Archive at Gladstone’s Library in North Wales, Shetland Noir in Lerwick (where we won the quiz!) and Capital Crime in London. Was great to meet so many readers and amazing writers there.

With the amazing Anne Cleeves

Going elbow to elbow with Vaseem Khan

Our winning quiz team: Jacky Collins. Louise Mangos. Tim Rideout. Verena Rose. Alis Hawkins.

There are several more events coming up, including the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, Bloody Scotland and Bute Noir. Do come and say hello if you’re there.

List of events and tickets are available here:

https://ajaychowdhury.com/events/

Things I loved this month

Anish Kapoor at the Hayward Gallery

Equus at the Menier Chocolate Factory

Dinner with my wife at The Shell Company in Highgate

Bowie at the Lightroom in London

The Eastern Eye ACTA awards

Competition

And finally, if you’d like to win a signed and personalised copy of a Kamil Rahman book of your choice (and get your answer published in a future book), please sign up for my newsletter and do the following:

Suggest a slogan for one of Anjoli’s T-shirts

Please do send an email with your suggestion to ajay@ajaychowdhury.com with the subject line “T-Shirt Competition” and which Kamil book you’d like if you do win.

My website is www.ajaychowdhury.com

I’m also on

X: @ajaychow

Instagram: @ajaychowdhury.author

Facebook: @ajaychowdhury.author

LinkedIn: ajaychowdhury1

Threads: @ajaychowdhury.author

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.