MEET THE WRITER
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‘Cooking allows for constant learning’: Chef Rahul Akerkar reflects on his career in his new memoir
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‘No matter how busy a train is, you can always find a quiet space’: Travel writer Monisha Rajesh
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‘Farming enables my writing, and my writing enables my farming’: Daniyal Mueenuddin
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‘The more equal a space, the more we see civilised behaviour’: Shinjini Kumar, author, ‘Busy Women’
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‘The ecological collapse is overwhelming, but observing something alive can counter it’: Neha Sinha
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‘My fascination with horror predates my fascination with history’: Eric Chopra, author of ‘Ghosted’
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‘The fundamental encounter between one soul and a new place hasn’t changed at all’: Writer Pico Iyer
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‘The act of listening is part of the story’: Anurag Banerjee on his book on Meghalaya’s music scene
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‘Masculinity is always at loggerheads between two men’: What Rahul Singh explores in his debut novel
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‘Jatra icon Chapal Bhaduri negotiated his sexuality without ever bothering about identity politics’
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‘The project of Railsong is to excavate the somebodiness of everybody’: Author Rahul Bhattacharya
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‘Glorification of couplehood skews honest conversations about love’: Writer Arundhati Ghosh
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‘Secrets simmer, things get unhinged in the heat’: Bhavika Govil on her ‘summer’ novel, ‘Hot Water’
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‘Prakrit is, like Sanskrit, a literary language’: Infosys Prize 2025 winner Andrew Ollett
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‘A history of the emotions of living in a particular period’: Sarnath Banerjee on ‘Absolute Jafar’
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‘Consent, accountability’: What educator Tanisha Rao wants to be taught better during sex education
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‘Women aren’t allowed to talk about their suffering:’ Anil Yadav on his novella about ‘courtesans’
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‘I write in blood, rooted in the soil where I belong’: Jnanpith Award winner Pratibha Ray
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‘History is about people, egos, personality clashes, little jealousies’: Biographer Narayani Basu
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‘Cultural superiority and exclusiveness located in its urbanity’: What makes Srinagar special
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‘What is going on in India and the US got me interested in writing about nationalism’: Kiran Desai
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‘I remain a sceptic despite the occurrences around me’: Sanjoy K Roy on his book on ghosts
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‘I wanted to write with feeling, but without sentimentality’: Anuradha Roy on her Himalaya memoir
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‘The Indian youth needs to know there is no shame in setting boundaries’: Sex educator Seema Anand
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‘More about psychological and social challenges now’: Author Bharti Kirchner on diaspora writing
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‘Writing is a way for me to be in the deepest conversation with myself’: Author Sonora Jha
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‘The world is a very malleable thing’: Why a quiz book wants to reignite a reader’s curiosity
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‘He embodied promises and limitations of technocracy’: Aparajith Ramnath on M Visvesvaraya’s legacy
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‘Urban wandering is central to my writing and how I live’: Debut novelist and editor Sayantan Ghosh
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‘The feelings are more autobiographical than the setting’: Aria Aber on her novel ‘Good Girl’
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‘He pulls everything that’s floating closer to the centre’: Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt
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‘Misreading Vajpayee as a Nehruvian liberal exaggerates the novelty of the 2014 mandate’
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‘An experience that can’t be submerged by loss’: Why Fauzia Rafique has written a migration novel
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‘Wonder is foundational to creativity’: Industrialist Subroto Bagchi looks back at life in new book
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‘To make them undeniable’: Why Mehak Jamal wrote stories of romantic love set in Kashmir
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‘A backdrop of geological time’: Gurnaik Johal on why his novel has the river Saraswati in it
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‘I write novels of ideas, but the ideas have to be lived by characters’: Author Sanjena Sathian
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‘Myth is a carrier of history, trauma, resistance’: Subi Taba on writing about Arunachal Pradesh
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‘Silences reveal as much as noise’: Malaysian writer Tash Aw on his new coming-of-age novel
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‘Women can be complicit in systems of violence, especially in families’: Writer Sophie Mackintosh
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‘The idea that KB Hedgewar was an ultra-Hindu is patently false’: Biographer Sachin Nandha
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‘What unites the Kannada world is an admiration for vachana literature’: Writer Srikar Raghavan
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‘To be an artist or a writer, you have to be in the business of serious noticing’: Amitava Kumar
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‘Not ethical questions, but aesthetic ones’: What’s on Keshava Guha’s mind while crafting a novel
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‘A permanent campaign machine’: How the professionalisation of politics has changed India after 2014
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‘The inner emotions of legal practice serve as raw, real-life material for my writing’: Banu Mushtaq
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‘We all look up at the same sky’: Jordan Quill, author of a children’s book on the magic of Tibet
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‘It would be a mistake to think that hyper-technological people don’t live by stories’: Amitav Ghosh
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‘A treasure hunt about the past’: Writer Johana Gustawsson on what makes crime fiction so popular
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‘The structures of capitalism do not automatically help a democracy’: Political activist Tariq Ali
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‘You can express feelings and sensations in black and white’: Graphic novelist Zeina Abirached
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‘There was no mention of our food’: Shahu Patole on why he wrote a book on Marathi Dalit cuisine
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‘With a pen, notebook, binoculars and passion, one can become a good naturalist’: Asad Rahmani
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‘The way a sari is worn is a living dictionary of India’s stories’: Cultural historian Malvika Singh
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‘Writing is a journey inside your head and sometimes the outside world is an obstacle’: Defne Suman
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‘In the consumption of art, labels need to be thrown out’: Santanu Bhattacharya on his ‘queer’ novel
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‘A subject that is guaranteed to make you universally disliked’: Pankaj Mishra on writing about Gaza
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‘I’m interested in the underdog more than I’m in the hero’: Indian-Canadian writer Deepa Rajagopalan
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The Joe Sacco interview: ‘If my work is going to be journalistic, it needs to be representational’
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‘I became an observer of my life as a fly on the wall’: How adman Prahlad Kakar wrote his memoir
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‘A quest to cling to something tangible’: Why Tarana Husain Khan writes about Rampur’s lost foods
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‘A memoir is also about the process of ‘becoming’ who you are’: Author Malavika Rajkotia
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‘A celebration of Dalit women’s ideas’: Shailaja Paik, first Dalit winner of a MacArthur Fellowship
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‘If I was a believer, I’d talk like him’: Why MG Vassanji wrote a novel about physicist Abdus Salam
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‘Syeda’s story is also Delhi’s story’: Why Neha Dixit wrote about an ‘unknown’ working-class woman
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‘There are tales of hope even in the face of relentless destruction’: Wildlife writer Stephen Alter
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‘The novels I write are pretty much an excuse to indulge my delight in language’: Rohit Manchanda
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‘I’m a product of Indian socialism’: Theatre actor-director MK Raina talks about his life and memoir
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‘I have spent at least a part of my day writing since the age of seven’: Anita Desai
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‘Longing and loneliness infuse my work’: Sanjana Thakur, 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner
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‘I wanted to know if feminist politics was all but lost’: Academic Srila Roy on her new book
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‘Queer, for me, is anything that deviates from normative desire’: Saikat Majumdar on his fiction
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‘Knowing we’re mortal gives us purpose’: Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan on his new book
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‘I stopped at an essential ambiguity’: How Sharmistha Mohanty wrote ‘Book One’ thirty years ago
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‘I want to connect culture, people, food in one sentence’: Restauranteur and food writer Asma Khan
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‘The story tells me to stop. Its shape is within it’: Writer Jayant Kaikini
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‘A fair amount of detective work’: How Manu Bhagavan wrote Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit’s biography
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‘The author must obsessively exile or exorcise themselves from the novel’: Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari
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‘I was testing the boundaries of motherhood and its impact on creative life’: Writer Bee Rowlatt
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‘Freedom fighters were not necessarily caste equality champions’: Writer Manoj Mitta
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‘Prophet Song is a lament for what we are and what we do’: Paul Lynch, 2023 Booker Prize winner
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‘I am not a linear writer. If it’s a 300-page novel, I am not writing it sequentially’: Benyamin
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‘Sheikh Abdullah’s story shows fraught centre-state relations’: Historian Chitralekha Zutshi
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‘Essential to ignore political correctness when writing’: French-language writer Shumona Sinha
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‘I’d like to write only my best novels’: 2023 International Booker Prize winner Georgi Gospodinov
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‘I am a profoundly profane writer’: Hernan Diaz, 2023 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction
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‘To ignore what cannot be grasped with reason is sheer stupidity’: CliFi writer Rajat Chaudhuri
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‘Literature saved my life. Writing gave me purpose’: Poet, writer, and queer activist Aditya Tiwari
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‘Modern Indians must go beyond the binaries of secular and religious’: Writer Chandan Gowda
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Interview: How a decade-old unsolved murder case became Atharva Pandit’s debut novel ‘Hurda’
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‘If India said it was pro-Palestine it was in self-interest’: Writer and journalist Azad Essa
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Interview: Vikramajit Ram, author of ‘Mansur’, shortlisted for the 2023 JCB Prize for Literature
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Interview: 2023 JCB Prize shortlisted author Manoranjan Byapari and translator V Ramaswamy
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Interview: Perumal Murugan, author of ‘Fire Bird’, shortlisted for the 2023 JCB Prize for Literature
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Interview: 2023 JCB Prize shortlisted author Manoj Rupda and translator Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar
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‘The idea that Buddhism is a branch of Hinduism began in late 1800s’: Writer-historian Douglas Ober
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Interview: Tejaswini Apte-Rahm, author of ‘The Secret of More’, shortlisted for the 2023 JCB Prize
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‘All of us have been commodified’: Anuradha Sarma Pujari, who wrote a novel about capitalism in 1997
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‘Disregard brand names and gendered marketing’: Writer Divrina Dhingra on appreciating perfumes
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Interview: In ‘Abundance’, a history of sexuality and the Gomantak Maratha Samaj