You draw from such a wide range of experiences and research from your books. How do you decide on which story to tell whenever you start a new project?
It's not a conscious process. Often you want to write, and you don't know what to write about. The paper just sits in front of you. Then there are other days, when suddenly you sit down to write and you have an idea. It's subconscious.
Your books and issues touch on such serious topics such as colonialism and ecological damage. Does your awareness of these issues take the joy out of visiting the places you reference?
I do write about very grim and serious things, but you'll see that my books are not depressing. It's impossible for me to write a book without having some fun. It's a strange thing about visiting places. Visiting a place doesn't really become real until you write about it, and it's really in the writing that you discover the joy.
You wrote The Nutmeg's Curse during the COVID-19 pandemic. How long had you been planning the book, and what were the unique challenges of writing at a time like this?
I had been thinking about the book for a long time, and I started writing it literally in the first week of the pandemic. I wrote it straight through in about 8 months, which for me was a record. The pandemic allowed a kind of deep focus. I had been thinking about various things when I wrote my previous book The great Derangement and there were lots of dangling ends, I just sat down and started pulling it all together. There were challenges like not being able to go to the library.
You mentioned non-western modes of storytelling. How has this impacted your own writing?
My book Gun island was really influenced by that, it really shaped how the book was written.
What is the future of South Asian novels?
South Asian novelists write very openly about human emotions and relationships. Also, about the wider political setting.Our books are about very human circumstances, and that's why our books have an universal appeal. I hope South Asian writers preserve this aspect.
Often when you try to read an American book, it's hard to understand the context because it's distant and specific.
Years ago when I was in America, , I read reviews of my books and they would often say these third world writers are always writing about politics because they had difficult lives. In the last 5 years since Trump, they are writing about politics, in some strange way they are catching up with us.
