I grew up in the town of New Liskeard in northeastern Ontario, Canada, fled home at fifteen, and lived on or near Toronto's skid row till I was thirty-four. I then lived in Europe for two years, and at thirty-six, I married in Pune, India. I've been in India ever since, and now live in Bengaluru's Electronic City.
I discovered Sanskrit when I was sixteen, learned the alphabet and something of the grammar when I was eighteen and nineteen, finally applied myself to working through Michael Coulson's Teach Yourself Sanskrit when I was twenty-nine, and have read Sanskrit literature nearly every day since I completed that course six months after beginning it. Early on, I became obsessed with the enormous epic Mahabharata, which is where all these quarter-verses are from.
This is the bare outline of what some have found to be an interesting story. By now, at forty-eight, I myself am naturally quite tired of it as an account of real events, but it has furnished me with the inspiration for a second novel, The Far Himalaya, soon to be published by the same publisher, and if that novel pleases anyone, I will not have lived its story in vain.
In the meantime, here is some information about me in the form of this two-part interview with my publisher:
lindaleith.com/Pages/blog/PhillipErnest
lindaleith.com/Pages/blog/PhillipErnestII
I discovered Sanskrit when I was sixteen, learned the alphabet and something of the grammar when I was eighteen and nineteen, finally applied myself to working through Michael Coulson's Teach Yourself Sanskrit when I was twenty-nine, and have read Sanskrit literature nearly every day since I completed that course six months after beginning it. Early on, I became obsessed with the enormous epic Mahabharata, which is where all these quarter-verses are from.
This is the bare outline of what some have found to be an interesting story. By now, at forty-eight, I myself am naturally quite tired of it as an account of real events, but it has furnished me with the inspiration for a second novel, The Far Himalaya, soon to be published by the same publisher, and if that novel pleases anyone, I will not have lived its story in vain.
In the meantime, here is some information about me in the form of this two-part interview with my publisher:
lindaleith.com/Pages/blog/PhillipErnest
lindaleith.com/Pages/blog/PhillipErnestII
The back-cover blurb for The Vetala:
Nada Marjanovic, professor of Sanskrit at the University of Zagreb, has for more than twenty years been translating an obscure Sanskrit book on the vetala, a parasitical vampire-like being that possesses the bodies of his victims. When her mentor and collaborator in the Indian city of Pune dies, she suddenly finds herself face to face again with the evil that the text describes, an evil which long ago killed her lover, and set her on the path of an obsessive scholarly revenge. The vetala's opposition grows increasingly desperate as she nears the text’s conclusion, and with the help of two friends struggles to decipher its climactic secret, which would allow her to exorcise the monster at last, and free not only the mysterious man whom he has possessed for centuries, but also, perhaps, her own imprisoned and forgotten love.
The back-cover blurb for The Far Himalaya:
Young and homeless on the streets of Toronto, a fugitive from an unquiet past that has followed him from his hometown in Northern Ontario, Benjamin Doheney is sustained by unusual sources of strength: his devotion to Sanskrit, the ancient literary language of India; the love he shares with Aditi, a PhD student in Sanskrit at the University of Toronto; and his vision of a future with her in India, a land in which she has her own troubled history, and which he has never seen. Before they can move on, they must extricate her from the clutches of her twisted and malevolent PhD supervisor with the help of his old enemy, a good professor emeritus who has taken the prodigious Ben under his wing, and of Moksha Das, a homeless alcoholic poet and scholar, Ben’s difficult guru and friend. When a mysterious assault on campus threatens to draw the police’s attention to Moksha, Ben and Aditi contrive to remove him to his old ashram north of the city. But events now begin to spiral out of control, inexorably drawing them all towards a probably bloody culmination which the couple’s hopes for a distant future peace may not survive.
Young and homeless on the streets of Toronto, a fugitive from an unquiet past that has followed him from his hometown in Northern Ontario, Benjamin Doheney is sustained by unusual sources of strength: his devotion to Sanskrit, the ancient literary language of India; the love he shares with Aditi, a PhD student in Sanskrit at the University of Toronto; and his vision of a future with her in India, a land in which she has her own troubled history, and which he has never seen. Before they can move on, they must extricate her from the clutches of her twisted and malevolent PhD supervisor with the help of his old enemy, a good professor emeritus who has taken the prodigious Ben under his wing, and of Moksha Das, a homeless alcoholic poet and scholar, Ben’s difficult guru and friend. When a mysterious assault on campus threatens to draw the police’s attention to Moksha, Ben and Aditi contrive to remove him to his old ashram north of the city. But events now begin to spiral out of control, inexorably drawing them all towards a probably bloody culmination which the couple’s hopes for a distant future peace may not survive.