Ruskin Bond interview

Q:Did you ever feel demoralised as a writer?

A:Yes, about 20-30 years ago, when I felt that my writing wasn’t being appreciated. But in the last few years, my readership has grown.

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1Q84 Cover unveiled

The English translation of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 is yet to hit the market - oh, how long I've been waiting for the book - but the cover of the US edition of the translation is just out.(Via Literary Saloon). And I like it.

IMHO U R GR8: Texting in literature

It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago.

They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.

Writer Kazumi Saeki on Japan earthquake

People have acquired a desire for technology that surpasses human comprehension. Yet the bill that has come due for that desire is all too dear.

Thirtieth anniversary of Alasdair Gray's Lanark

When Alasdair Gray published his novel Lanark thirty years ago, Anthony Burgess had these words: It was about time Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. This is it. The first major Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott.

The thirtieth anniversary of the novel is being celebrated now.

Margaret Atwood interview

"I mean, I'm not worried about the world not existing. We're unlikely to kill all life on Earth by blowing up the entire planet. But are we going to do away with ourselves? That's much more possible.

Hanif Kureishi on the art of writing

The piece of writing I usually most enjoy doing is inevitably the thing I'm not supposed to be doing, so it can seem illicit. I like to work on something over a long period, returning to it repeatedly, adding, subtracting and altering, and taking advice from editors and friends, until I can't bear to look at it, which is when I guess it's done. Writing is highly labour intensive. It takes a lot of time – and much patient toleration of boredom, frustration and self-loathing – to achieve anything. Then you try to sell something to the world it doesn't know it needs.

What is your main aim as a writer?

Miguel Syjuco interview

I want to write a book that makes people debate, and makes people think, interact with each other and exchange ideas … I write because I’m engaged in this big conversation.

Another Arundhati Roy interview

I don’t really do research in order to write. Finding out about things, figuring out the real story—what you call research—is part of life now for some of us. Mostly just to get over the indignity of living in a pool of propaganda, of being lied to all the time, if nothing else.


In Guernica,Amitav Kumar interviews Arundhati Roy.

Why China has no great writers now

"Why is contemporary China short of works that speak directly? Because we writers cannot speak directly, or rather we can only speak in an indirect way Why does contemporary China lack good works that critique our current situation? Because our current situation may not be critiqued. We have not only lost the right to criticise, but the courage to do so; Why is modern China lacking in great writers? Because great writers are castrated while still in the nursery.
"

H.M. Naqvi interview

Q:Of late, one is noticing a reverse brain drain to Pakistan with well established writers coming back home, and making Pakistan their place of residence: Daniyal Mueenuddin, Mohsin Hamid and Hanif besides you. Is it something about the home country that is attracting the writers back, a kind of nostalgia or the feeling of being an outsider in the West?

A:I don't have empirical data on the matter. I can, however, speak for myself. I returned because I had no money. In any event, there's no place like home. I love Karachi. It's a wonderfully animate city. There are people on the beach at two in morning, traffic at three. You can have breakfast at four – halva, puri – and nihari at five. Moreover, as a writer I wouldn't want to be elsewhere for long. There's a story under every stone.

How and where do you find material for your books?

Answers from three writers

I find it among people. I find it in tiny rooms and in passenger terminals, in dreams, in books, and in experiences from the past that are the poetry of memories. I find it among the streets in which I grew up. I find it in my senses. Imagination is the extension of experience.
-Lars Saabye Christensen,Norwegian novelist



I don't know. What I know is that there is a certain way of life I have to live in order to be able to write the best I can. It doesn't mean only having enough free time and space, but also trying to avoid everyday stereotypes, traveling, doing adventurous things, experiencing uncertainty. That is what I need. My mind is what matters. Topics and material then come by themselves.
-Petra Hulova,Czech writer


In life, in my memories, in family history, friends' stories, textbooks, newspapers, television, documents, archives. I think it depends more on how you look at things than on the things themselves.
-Jenny Erpenbeck, German writer

Leila Aboulela interview

"And those early years of my life in Sudan are still my bearing and measure. But I went in a different direction. That was my fate."

Leila Aboulela, Sudanese writer, is interviewed at Times Live.

Edna O'Brien interview

"When I read something thrilling or I write a good line. When I have a lovely drink - I drink white wine or champagne. When I'm with someone, usually it's one other person, rather than a crowd, whose intelligence and stimulatingness is great. Because one wants to be both inside one's self and removed from one's self. Those things make me happy.

"Nature makes me happy, even though I live in the city, deliberately; I don't think I have the inner resources to live alone in the country. I wish I knew more about music. I listen to classical music, and sometimes I am bestirred, but language is my first love in the arts, and then painting. I love paintings."

Are men better writers?

Literary magazines and high-end literary fiction might still be a bit of a boys’ club, but the club is run by women

A writer's absolute essentials

A dressing gown, a hot water bottle and some whisky if you can procure it

Gliterature!

The Lit zone is the new hot spot. If earlier it was Rohit Bal taking his shirt that caught your pg 3 eye, now it'll be William Dalrymple like a big dervish(thankfully with his kurta on)doing the trick. There's a new influx of babalogs and Beautiful People in the earlier boring world of book events. The truth is: even the writers look smarter and prettier these days. With a dash of Brechtian 'temporary suspension of disbelief', you could be at a Taj hotel attending not the lunch of the winter collection of Tarun Tihalini but at the lunch of Rana Dasgupta's new novel.

Of course, it's from a story of an Indian daily's culture page, done by a literary savvy scribe. Take note of the tone of the writer. He seems to take great delight in reporting Dalrymple's trick, new influx of 'babalogs and Beautiful People'(who never read literature) in the book events, and glamorous book lunches.

Alas, this sums up the literary scenario in India and elsewhere, courtesy the new culture that free market economy has fostered. Literature is now touted as gliterature. Would you laugh or worry?

Death of the sentence!

A kind of death of the sentence by collective neglect. Kloske is right that the incessant dribble of mini-messaging has made most people’s daily use of written language brutally factual in character, more private ad copy than prose.

Jaipur Lit Festival & William Dalrymple

The article is more than a fortnight old, but since the Jaipur Lit Festival is still on, it's not stale yet, featuring as it does William Dalrymple, "the pompous literary arbiter of literary merit in India", who calls the shot as its director.

It is not for nothing that over the recent past, Dalrymple has been in conversation with authors as diverse as Tishani Doshi (though a romance linking Wales and Gujarat is perhaps a fit setting for him) and Sonia Faleiro (what could Dalrymple have to contribute to the Bar Girls of Bombay?; on the evidence of the evening, not much). Symbols matter, and if Dalrymple appears central to our literary culture, it says something far more damaging about us than about him.

Literary Festival or Fashion Week?

Some literary festivals have become the Bombay Times party of the book world. Not surprising, considering that some writers now get more advances than models. With money and fame both at their feet, the literati is no different from the glitterati. This is why even those whose bedtime reading is their credit card statement will elbow their way to the DPC Jaipur Literary Festival opening this Friday. It has evolved into a new genre of Fashion Week. Everyone is turned out in intellectual chic, or the bohemian Dalrumpled look.

From Jaipur to Kolkata, this is the season of literary festivals all across India. I know no one better to give a low-down on them than Bachi Karkaria, that fabulous columnist, with her cutting wit and humour.