Another Pankaj Mishra interview

I think the days in which I would imagine a writer working in a vacuum, isolated from all political currents, producing [work] for a small minority of sophisticated readers, those days never really existed first of all, and those days are more and more remote now. I guess it’s very easy to dramatise this as ‘writers as activists’. But it’s much simpler than that. You are in this world, you have certain experiences of the world, you have to be truthful about those experiences. And when those experiences are misrepresented in public, then you have to speak up. Otherwise, you do injustice to yourself, your experiences, your writing.