Raising the profile of South Asian writers since 2007
Q. The collection, Saris and a Single Malt really works as a whole piece, with each individual poem moving you along the journey from your mother being unwell, her death, to coming to terms with her death. Was the poetry always with you during this tumultuous time? Poetry and pain never left my side—from the …
Interview with Mary Mount, a fiction editor at Viking, part of Penguin Random House UK. Mary has published authors including John le Carré, Hisham Matar, Colm Tóibín, Naomi Alderman and Nina Stibbe. Q. We’re really excited about the #WriteNow initiative. Why is Penguin Random House reaching out to marginalised writers? Books and writers are …
Q. Tell us a bit about yourself and how you started your writing journey? Like most writers I have always written in one way or another but as a working parent with three children it was never going to be easy to make it a priority, at least not until the kids were a bit …
As a qualified accountant you came into writing later in life. Tell us more about how and why you decided to become a writer? My journey from accountant to writer began back in the autumn of 2013. I was thirty-nine at the time, hurtling towards forty and I had the hope that maybe there might …
How important was it for you to set your series in Bradford? It was important to set the series in Bradford, my home town. It is a city with amazing history – a hundred years ago the richest city in Europe. It is a city steeped in glory from the industrial boom days but over …
Tell us about your debut novel, Where the River Parts? Where the River Parts follows a Hindu Muslim couple caught up in the traumatic Partition of India and Pakistan. They are separated during the process, and don’t see each other for the next fifty years. It is only half a decade later, as both India …
Q. What inspired you to write a psychological thriller? Have you always been fascinated by them or has it been a recent obsession? It’s a return to my roots! My last two novels (The Naked Name of Love and Sugar Island, published by John Murray) were historical fiction, but my first two were literary thrillers. …
Q. The Living is your third novel. Tell us more about the novel writing process. What was different this time round, if at all? The novel writing process is: you’re in the dark, excited to find out about all sorts of things, seeing links, having insights, running around, wondering if you’ve finally lost it (no, actually …
Q. Your debut novel, Londonstani achieved a six-figure advance and was applauded by critics. Looking back, do you think it was a victim of its own early success? The book was clearly a victim of its own hype, but at the same time I actually reckon the hype was this necessary evilness. Because the hype meant that Londonstani found …
Interviewed by James Wilkinson Since publishing her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, Anuradha Roy has developed into one of the most exciting new voices of South Asian literature. Published to critical acclaim, her first novel was published in thirteen different languages. Her second novel, The Folded Earth won the Economist Crossword Book Award 2011 and achieved …