MEET THE WRITER
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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
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Interview: Prizewinning cricket writer Nicholas Brookes talks to Booker winner Shehan Karunatilaka
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‘I had a gut feeling 2014 was a pivot’: Novelist Devika Rege, author of ‘Quarterlife’
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‘One of the great 20th Century experiments’: Historian Nikhil Menon on India’s central plans
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‘Death was a constant motif in his music’: Jupinderjit Singh, author of ‘Who Killed Moosewala?’
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‘In my novel, caste is the co-protagonist’: Ujjal Dosanjh, author of ‘The Past is Never Dead’
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‘I’d prefer a just world where my novels have no relevance beyond questions of art’: Siddhartha Deb
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‘Human artists should create art that has only sparsely existed before’: Writer Karan Madhok
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‘I can’t write about anything else except Pondicherry’: Ari Gautier, author of ‘The Thinnai’
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‘We’re not equipping young people with the evolved skills needed for new jobs’: Avik Chanda
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‘Pakistan’s erasure of the 1971 Liberation War from conversations is dangerous’: Author Aamina Ahmad
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‘I don’t think we should write stories being fearful of how they will be received’: Nilanjana S Roy
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‘As a writer I’m apolitical and spiritually free. That is how I’d like to retain myself’: Jeyamohan
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‘The challenge was to produce a language, not just use what is accepted as correct’: Sundar Sarukkai
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Interview: Historian Guillemette Crouzet on how the British India helped invent the ‘Middle East’
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‘I wanted to show that mothers are worthy’: Bonnie Garmus, author of ‘Lessons in Chemistry’
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‘I always think of married women with children as very sad people’: Writer Buku Sarkar
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S Irfan Habib: ‘Maulana Abul Kalam Azad espoused composite nationalism all his life’
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‘I wanted to write something that feels authentically desi in its queerness’: Sarah Thankam Mathews
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‘Writing is a means to seek not truth, but what’s real’: Annie Ernaux, winner of 2022 Nobel Prize
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Interview: Atul Mishra on the ‘sovereignty trap’ and Nehru's civilisational reading of India’s past
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‘I’m trying to join the dots, figuring how the system works’: Deepti Kapoor on writing ‘Age of Vice’
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‘Economic policies are seldom based on past effectiveness or endorsements alone’: Ashok Lahiri
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‘I can be scientifically sound in my research and still have a yeti in my story’: Shubhangi Swarup
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‘I turned my impatience into something useful’: Ruth Ozeki, winner of 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction
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‘My story springs from nature’: Orijit Sen on creating first Indian graphic novel ‘River of Stories’
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Interview: With China facing a policy dilemma, India should leverage its strategic value to Beijing
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‘Immigration made me into a writer. I thought about India all the time’: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
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Meet writer Khadija Abdalla Bajaber, winner of the inaugural Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction
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‘The win makes time more precious’: Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature
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‘What is life? Not an unanswerable question. It doesn’t have a single answer’: Siddhartha Mukherjee
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The Siddhartha Mukherjee interview: ‘Even mental diseases have an impact on cellular behaviour’
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‘Read with an intent to learn writing. Write fast. Find three honest readers’: Author Tanuj Solanki
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‘Your dysfunctional family is the source of all your stories’: Author-translator-poet Jerry Pinto
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‘I guess now I finally have a writing career’: Shehan Karunatilaka on winning the 2022 Booker Prize
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‘Goa homeowners want to save our natural and architectural assets’: Activist-writer Heta Pandit
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‘History is not simply a recounting of the past, but a perspective’: Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee
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‘Ashoka was not faceless. He made himself visible through his words’: historian Nayanjot Lahiri
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‘Fiction is a major part of my creative existence and poetry, of my creativity’: Writer Anita Nair
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Interview: Akshaya Mukul on why Hindi modernist writer ‘Agyeya’ is still relevant
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‘Some say my translations read like originals, and originals, like translations’: Aruna Chakravarti
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‘The power of the word has in no way shrunk’: Vivek Shanbhag on writing and its possibilities
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‘I am writing limericks and the other day I had a lollipop after seventy years’: Ruskin Bond at 88
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‘When we see other people’s stories, as we do on the Delhi Metro, we gain empathy and understanding’
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Interview: Priya Satia on the ‘earnestly deliberate hypocrisy’ of the British Empire
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Chinmay Tumbe interview: ‘Unless a pandemic is over everywhere, it is never really over’
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‘I cannot separate Shah Rukh from the lived experiences of his female fans’: Shrayana Bhattacharya
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‘Fascism is never static, it always reinvents itself’: TD Ramakrishnan, author of the novel ‘Alpha’
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‘There is a great hunger to see ourselves reflected in history, to hear our stories’: Ira Mukhoty
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‘Making history enjoyable is more difficult than people sometimes think’: Manu S Pillai
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‘Writing is a form of detective work, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction’: Marlon James
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‘I simply write what I have experienced, what I know’: Damon Galgut, 2021 Booker Prize winner
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Trump, placentas, feminism (and more): Author Siri Hustvedt describes what shapes her stories
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Ramachandra Guha interview: Hyper-nationalism is contrary to traditions of India’s freedom struggle
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‘I’m a happy old girl’: The Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 80th birthday interview
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‘You could say I have been working towards my mermaid graphic novels my whole life’
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‘Dear Pankaj...Yours, Amit’: An email chat between novelists Pankaj Mishra and Amit Chaudhuri
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‘Writing fiction is becoming other people, along with many invented selves of one’s own’
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‘A king could have commanded the worst atrocities on enemies and yet built awe-inspiring temples’
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‘I don’t see death as the end, but the beginning:’ writer Anees Salim
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‘I see sexuality as an essential part of life, not as a separate compartment’: Damodar Mauzo
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‘I had no Konkani books to read. It was the language in which one laughed’: Damodar Mauzo
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‘Human nature doesn’t change’: Madhulika Liddle on the challenges of writing historical fiction
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‘I’d like to see historical fiction that talks less about kings and wars and more about people’
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‘For a fuller understanding of modern India, we must also investigate the princely states’
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‘No one person gets to limit what it means to be Indian’: Namit Arora, author of ‘Indians’
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‘The Sanskrit texts divided horses into castes, just as they divided people’: Wendy Doniger
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Rahul Mehrotra interview: ‘The landscape of Indian democracy requires a pluralistic imagination’
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Interview: Dipesh Chakrabarty on how climate change upends long-standing ideas of modernity
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Interview: ‘The Braided River’ author Samrat Choudhury on writing about the Brahmaputra
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‘Throughout the novel there are sightings of the migrant, as ancient a figure as any’: Jeet Thayil
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‘Children’s literature is the first portal for humans to the cultural world’: Oliver Jeffers
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‘We have not comprehended the real scars left by the lockdown’: Author Udayan Mukherjee
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‘A debut can happen at any age. Coming late to publishing doesn’t mean coming late to writing.’