Author Interviews

With falling author earnings it is common for writers to supplement their income with teaching or part time work. But the portfolio career or ‘slashie’ – juggling two or three entirely different careers at the same time – is a new way of working and it’s on the rise. Crime writer Vaseem Khan tells us …

In her breath-taking new novel, Exquisite Cadavers Meena Kandasamy raises the curtain and invites the reader into what is often seen as a mysterious process. Sitting neatly in the margins Kandasamy dissects her creative process revealing how her ideas are worked into fiction. I begin by asking Kandasamy whether writing Exquisite Cadavers made her feel …

Toni Morrison said that if the book you want to read isn’t out there, write it yourself. So I did. I wrote it over a year-and-a-half and called it Strange. Growing up, I read voraciously, and short stories were a particular favourite. I especially enjoyed the ones with cleverly constructed plots that culminated in deliciously …

When did you know you had a story in you that you wanted to share? Many years ago, when my baby boy became ill, and the word SCID entered my life, I thought, one day, I would write about it to increase awareness about this rare and fatal condition. I was however conscious that I …

Earlier this year, Cultural eXchanges Festival welcomed authors Nikesh Shukla and Mahsuda Snaith for an in conversation event. Held in association with The Asian Writer, the evening took place at De Montfort University Leicester and explored Nikesh’s phenomenal rise, from early life as an amateur rapper to editor of best-selling collection of essays, The Good …

Q. Can you start by telling us a bit about Things my Mother Told Me? What is the main story line? And what inspired the novel?  A decade ago, I broke up with a boyfriend who had an affair with a burlesque dancer, and I started to write this story. Except I realised there was …

I’ve wanted to write a novel since I was 16. Even though teachers and lecturers knew I could write well, none ever suggested writing as a possible career. Perhaps being Asian, from a single parent, working class background, they thought the possibility of me being a writer was a bit far fetched? There weren’t any …

Dr Rangan Chatterjee never set out to write a book but following his hit TV show, Doctor in the House, he had significant interest from publishers. The 4 Pillar Plan is Dr Chatterjee’s blueprint for how to live well in the modern world. It divides health into four pillars; diet, sleep, movement and relaxation. Dr …

It was Sumayya Usmani’s longing for home that led her to start a memoir-based food blog. At the time, she was working as a full-time lawyer, missing Pakistan and the food that she grew up with. She noticed that no-one was representing Pakistani cuisine, or what made it distinctive from its neighbours. Usmani began writing …

When did you decide that this story needed to be written? There are two moments that are crucial: there was one point within my marriage when I knew that I had to write out what I was living through because it seemed so improbable, incredible and horrendous and above all, frightening. I knew that to …