Bend it like Balli

Just writing something end of the day or being affirmed by the recognition of a fellowship, being recognized by fellow writers and critics, that is very humbling and it makes me feel like I am doing something worthwhile, says Balli Jaswal, the youngest winner of the David T K Wong Fellowship, in a tête-à-tête with Zafar Anjum, editor of Writers Connect.

I was facing a very unusual dilemma when one evening last November I found myself walking to the Arts House to interview Balli Jaswal. While I was curious to meet Balli, who is a young journalist and a first-time novelist, I was not sure how to engage her in a meaningful discussion.

The reason for my dilemma was this: for most writers interviewed, one has the benefit of reading the subject’s works (novels, essays, stories, journalistic pieces, poems) in advance to help form an opinion. In Balli’s case what she has been working on (a sample of that text, not available to me, won her the 2007 David T K Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia, UK) is not in the public domain yet; at the same time, her winning of the prestigious fellowship establishes her credentials as a ‘writer’ beyond doubt and the potential she embodies as a successful future writer.

That’s why when I met the vivacious Balli, I started with a very basic question—one that sprang from my mind with a tinge of Naipaulian determinism and determination: When did she ‘decide’ to become a writer?

“I don’t know if I ever decided it,” Balli said, attentively noticing the nuances of the word ‘decide’ that I had used in my question. “I think it occurred to me as something that I was good at doing, something I really enjoyed doing …I just kept doing…”

“I don’t think I can still be defined as a writer,” she said putting the matter to rest.

At one level, Balli had stated the absolute truth. Her first book was yet to be out (Naipaul once said that he did not think he had become a writer until he had published five books). At another level, she was being humble. Like the past David T K Wong Fellowship winners (Balli is the youngest winner), she too has been marked, destined for a literary stardom.

The making of a writer

Balli had a childhood that spanned across many countries in Asia, including Japan, Russia, the Philippines and Singapore. That experience, of living and growing in many cities, of dealing with people of different cultures, informed her ways of seeing the world. “I gathered a realization that communication is very different for me than other people,” she said. “The word, the language that you choose becomes very important (in a multicultural setting). You tend to listen to dialogue differently.”

Out of this body of experience, according to her, schooling in Singapore played a significant role. “Schooling in international schools, writing competitions in Singapore really honed that drive for writing,” she said.

After schooling, Balli decided to pursue her dreams of becoming a writer. Not everyone agreed that this was a good move. Nevertheless, she carried on and got to study creative writing in the USA at Hollins University and George Mason University. In fact, she ended up attending the same creative writing course (at Hollins University) that was attended by Booker Prize-winner Kiran Desai.

But did the creative writing programme really help her? “I think more than anything it gave me confidence,” she said. “It gave me some affirmation that what I was writing was important. You do a lot more criticism than writing and you tend to learn what other people are doing right and wrong. So that sort of training was important for me to become a writer.”

But not everybody is fortunate enough to study creative writing. Can such unfortunate people still become writers, I meant to ask her. “As long as you instill that discipline (of writing) for yourself and have a community that you can turn to and have a sense of confidence in your writing, you can do it,” she said.

“It can never hurt you to be in a creative writing programme,” she added matter-of-factly. “Even out of your assignment you get a volume of work, even if it is crap that you don’t want to look at again.”

Winning the fellowship

After finishing her creative writing course, Balli returned to Singapore to work on her first novel, When Amrit Returns. She also took up a teaching assignment. That’s when she was awarded the 2007 T K Wong Fellowship.

“I was in complete shock,” she said on her getting the fellowship. “And I was just elated. It was exactly what I wanted or needed. I couldn’t have asked for anything better. I think it is the highlight of my life.”

Balli said that when she was shortlisted for the fellowship, she thought ok, she had got that far. “But when I got it, that was really beyond my expectation,” she said.

The fellowship took her to the University of East Anglia (UEA) for about one year. “It was an interesting experience,” she said recounting her experience. “I had just a vast amount of time all of a sudden. Before that I had been teaching in Singapore. Very busy all the time. Didn’t have much time to write as anyone with a full time job would. And suddenly I had the entire day, the whole day to sit and write and I knew I was prone to freezing up – OMG what do I do now. So I tried to work myself out of that a lot. I took it one day at a time which I realized it was a good step to take.”

But there also was a downside to the experience. “It was a very isolating experience in a lot of ways,” she said. “That is the nature of that kind of position I guess.”

During her time at UEA, apart from writing, she also got to meet other students doing their Masters. “They were really nice” she said. She also had a mentor who was supposed to guide her. “But it was a flexible relationship,” she added.

In UK, most of the time she was working on her book. Between breakfast and lunch, she cooked her own meals. She used to sketch out what she was going to write in the day, know where to start and know where to stop. “I tried to churn out something everyday,” she said. “I thought it was important to do.”

An Indian writer?

Taking a break from writing related questions, I asked her how she saw herself, what kind of writer she thought she was. Did she think she was an Indian writer or a Singaporean writer or a hyphenated one?

“The writing that I do I can’t just call it Indian writing,” she said. “It is not based in India but my characters are mostly Indian. I am a Singaporean Indian writer who wrote the only Singapore Indian book so far and hopefully there will be more so I will be in the company of others who have done the same thing. If not, I would like to be described as an immigrant writer.”

Whatever way publishers and critics will pigeonhole Balli in the hierarchy of writers, she is certainly interested in the stories of immigration like many of her contemporary expat Indian writers. “I am very interested in the background of immigration and how it is represented in literature and how multiculturalism shakes that landscape,” she said. “I have been an immigrant in so many different contexts.”

Balli also likes to explore issues of cultural isolation. “You can be a part of a culture and be still outside it,” she said.

In the same vein, she finds language very interesting, how in different ways language is used and how people perceive language.

Her first novel

The conversation now veered towards a new topic: Balli’s first novel, When Amrit Returns. “It takes place between the late 60s and the early 90s,” she said about the temporal setting of her work in progress. “It centres around the life of a Punjabi family in Singapore whose lives start to unravel when their youngest daughter changes and goes missing. That is the first part of the book. Physically she comes back but mentally she is not all there. From any reader’s point of view it is quite clear that she has a mental illness. But the family does not recognize it as such because they are still rooted in tradition. Singapore becomes third world to first very rapidly in that timeframe bit people don’t catch up with that. So, they think she is not well raised or she is possessed. And even when they realize that she has a mental illness they don’t want to deal with it because of the taboos surrounding it. But there is a twist in the end” (she laughs).

“In a lot of ways, Singaporeans have lost their homeland. I left Singapore for nine months and when I can back, there were new buildings. My parents who were born here also talk about the loss of their homeland. They lived in very different circumstances than they are living now.”

Many interviewers and readers would want to know how other writers or their writings have influenced a budding writer. I am no different, so I asked Balli about her favourite writers. I tend to like books than writers, was her reply. Fair enough, I thought. Then she took some names. On top of her list is the Indian writer (who now lives in Canada) Rohington Mistry. “If he wrote the phone book, I would read it,” she said about Mistry. She waxed eloquent about Satnam Sanghera’s biography of his mother (the best biog I have ever read), wowed about Margaret Attwood’s Cat’s Eye and raved about Yiyun Li’s short stories.

Towards the end of the interview, I again took Balli to the elemental question—what did she feel about her journey so far, what did it all mean to her? Her reply showed the depth of her understanding of the state of being a writer. “Just writing something end of the day or being affirmed by the recognition of a fellowship, being recognized by fellow writers and critics, that is very humbling and that makes me feel like I am doing something worthwhile,” she said. “Though I wouldn’t refuse a huge advance” she said with laughter that I will always remember her for.

Interview with Balli Jaswal, 2007 David T.K. Wong Fellow

I met Balli Jaswal (T K Wong Fellow 2007) at the Arts House, Singapore for an interview. Balli, who is still at work on her first novel, tentatively titled, When Amrit Returns, is the youngest winner of the David T.K. Wong Fellowship.

For introduction's sake, Balli was born in Singapore and grew up in Japan, Russia and the Phillipines. She studied creative writing at Hollins University (where Kiran Desai also went) and George Mason University. She is currently based in Singapore and works as a journalist.

Talking books with Deepika Shetty

Some have just a little brush with celebrities and they think they have lived their life's worth. But some are fortunate enough to have literally gone to the level of one's dentition with a celebrity. Journalist and literary blogger Deepika Shetty is one of them. In one of her recent literary meetings in Sri Lanka, famous novelist Vikram Seth offered to publicly examine the state of her teeth. Apparently, as Nury Vitacchi puts it, at one point of the discussion, Vikram Seth told an entertaining story about a relative who was a one-armed dentis and to illustrate the challenges involved, he put his arm around the head of moderator Deepika Shetty and duly inspected her back molars.

But that is just one of Deepika's many literary brushes, so to speak.
Those who tread the literary red carpet in this part of the world--Singapore (Singapore writers festival), Ubud, Bali (Ubud writers and readers festival), Australia (Byron Bay Writers Festival) and Sri Lanka (Galle Writers Festival)--would have mostly probably already seen her in action, grilling a celebrity author or a panel of writers. In the last few years, Deepika has been actively engaged in not only moderating writers's sessions in these festivals but has also been increasingly involved in organising these literary events.

Until late last year, Deepika was associated with two leading TV programmes in Singapore--Show Prime Time and Off The Shelves, the latter an interactive programme with authors. Deepika now works with The Starits Times.

Her job as a literary editor, mirroring her deep interest in the world of books and writers, afforded her opportunities to meet a myriad variety of writers that general people can only dream about: Shashi Tharoor, Paul Theroux, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, Jeffrey Sachs, Thomas Friedman, Alexander McCall Smith, Nury Vittachi, Chitra Banerji Divakaruni, Neil Gaiman and Suhayl Saadi to name a few.

Hailing from Chandigarh, Deepika has a masters in political science from Panjab University. She started writing book reviews for The Tribune, which paved the path for her to become a full-fledged journalist. In India, she was a journalist with the daily ‘The Times of India’ and the newsmagazine ‘India Today’ before she moved to Singapore almost a decade ago to achieve greater heights in her career.

In an exclusive interview, Deepika takes us on a fascinating journey of books and writers and tells us what it takes to engage with great literary minds like Vikram Seth and Michael Ondaatje. Excerpts:


1. You interview writers for TV and print, you engage them in intelligent discussions at writers festivals and book readings, and you blog about books regularly. In short, you live and breathe books. How did you develop such serious interest in books and writers?

DS: By not being forced to read books. My mother surrounded us with books and comics, but never pushed us to read them. School work was not to be missed, the other reading could be done on our own time. Apart from academic pains, my childhood was wonderful. My sister and I read a lot of Amar Chitra Katha, Asterix, Champak, Twinkle, a fair bit of Enid Blyton, the Schoolgirl comics, even Archie at a slightly later stage.

We spent ever summer at my grandmother’s house and it was filled with a lot of books on war strategy, conflict, war zones and a lot of literature books. The eclectic collection traced its roots to my grand-father, (Brigadier Sampuran Singh) who was a war hero (he received the Maha Vir Chakra and Vir Chakra).

Every year, we’d dust those books religiously. The dusting effort would earn us a princely sum of two rupees every week that we would save up to buy Schoolgirl comics from the Capital Book Store in Chandigarh. In addition to all those books, my Aunt had studied literature and we knew all the names even before we knew what was in the book. There was Shakespeare, Hemingway, Pearl S Buck, Anita Desai, R K Narayan and a whole lot more. But till the age of 15, I hadn’t made any serious effort to read any of their works. After my 10th Board exams, when I was liberated from the pain of having to deal with Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and veered towards Humanities something happened. I started reading. I’d spend all my spare time in the college library. If it was a holiday and the college library was open, you’d be sure to find me there. The librarian would always urge me to head back home, when it was time to lock up. I think by the time I was done with my Bachelor of Arts degree I would have read every single book the library had to offer. I’d even make recommendations for new book buys. It was great to see that be taken seriously. The journey that started at the age of 15 hasn’t showed any signs of slowing. There is always a book in my bag. I can read anywhere. In the cab, on the bus, by poolside, before lunch, after lunch – you name it. Even now, when I go back to my grandmother’s house there is a standard joke about my working towards a PhD in reading.

My late induction into the world of words is also explains why I’m a reluctant speaker when I’m asked to talk about what it takes to get children reading. Honestly, I don’t have any serious advice to give, nor am I in the business of dishing out advice. What worked for me, might not even work for my own children, so who am I to say anything? What I do believe is that reading is a love, it has to be nurtured, it can’t be forced upon you and once you’ve found it, there is no fear of ever losing it. I’ve traveled to so many places thanks to the wonderful world of books, I have made so many friends thanks to the written word. Sometimes I feel I’m in Bangladesh, other times in Sunderbans, or feeling the pain of the Biafra war, a book can do it for you. It’s an intense experience. I love watching movies too though the movie experience doesn’t have the magical impact of books. You can take your book anywhere, it can be a part of your life, you mark the lines that moved you, a couple of years later, you re-visit the places marked by the post-its and it feels like it’s time for another adventure again.

I digress a bit, but I think there is one incident worth recalling. It was while we were on a tram at the Singapore Zoo a couple of years ago. There was this young mother with her son. She was so focused on teaching her young son everything. “Look at the tree,” she’d go, “how do you spell it?” “T-R-E-E.” She even had a note-pad in which she was writing everything and spelling it out again. By the end of the short ride, she had pronounced and spelt out everything – Tiger, Lion, Monkey, Giraffe, Hippo and her son was just listening quietly. Now, that’s a sure way of killing the adventure, I thought to myself. And I think, it was an assessment that wasn’t too far off the mark. When the tram ride ended, the little boy, who couldn’t be more than five was the quietest among the bunch of noisy children. Yes, induction is important, but I’ve always felt there is a really thin line between doing it for fun, doing it your way and making the reading experience close to the academic one.

2. Singapore does not have a Book TV kind of a channel but your programme on Channel NewsAsia, Off the Shelf, comes closest to it. How did it come about?

DS: Lots of talking. Old habits die hard. I was always talking books. I was reading them all the time and I was recommending the good ones to anyone and everyone who cared to lend me an ear. One of them happened to be my former boss, Susanna Kulatissa. She possibly saw that spark somewhere and suggested I start a book on Prime Time Morning, Channel NewsAsia’s breakfast show. It didn’t happen instantly. While I’d been writing book reviews since I was 18, television was a totally different ball game.

Several things bothered me. How would I make it work? Could it be sustained on a weekly basis? Would there be enough content? Most importantly, could I really do it? Susanna would bring it up at every other weekly edit meeting and I’d hesitate. In the end, she just pushed me to the wall and set a deadline, I shall be eternally grateful for that. It took four months of work (lots of it), to get the segment off the ground. It included everything, right from thinking about the title – Off the Shelf, working out the graphics for the segment, promos, establishing contact with book publishers in Singapore and beyond, finding writers, filming. I was breathing books, every weekend saw me in a book store or filming. Then just as we were ready to flip the page, three weeks before the segment was to take off, my months of labour was lost. The entire Off the Shelf folder disappeared from the computer system, the IT experts couldn’t trace it even in the back up files. In that instant, I was shattered. I felt like the segment was destined not to take off. Those testing moments taught me several things. Not too plan too far ahead. To expect the unexpected. When the unexpected happens, to pull yourself together and get on with it. As I write this, I find it hard to believe all of that was three years ago.

The segment started with ‘The Ambassador Series’ where High Commissioners based in Singapore spoke about books that caught their attention. Many of their recommendations tipped off my reading in the months ahead. I can’t thank them enough for their attention, their time and their extended support for the segment.

3. You have interviewed scores of internationally famous writers for your TV show. Was it difficult to get guests for the show as Singapore herself does not have many writers?

DS: Initially, yes. But I found a way around it by doing phone interviews. There were several in the initial months of Off The Shelf. With Vikram Seth, Jeffrey Sachs, Chitra Banerji Divakaruni, Amitav Ghosh, Tarun Tejpal, Rana Dasgupta and many others. They willingly gave their time to an untested book segment and shared so much about the writing process. Each interview was a humbling experience. There was so much more I needed to learn, miles to go, as they say. As the segment established a reputation of sorts, authors started writing to me, publicists were pitching interviews and the blank slate soon found itself transformed into an over-booked segment. It was always hard to say no, to turn down some interviews that deserved air time. But there were times when two authors happened to be in town at the same time and I had to pick one. It was heart-wrenching to say no on occasions like that. Not being able to interview some authors when they were in town is one of my deepest regrets.

4 . Writers are known to be quirky individuals. Any memorable experience of interviewing eminent writers for the show?

DS: Meeting Paul Theroux was a revelation. So much has been written about him, about his friendship with V S Naipaul, how things fell apart between the two of them. Based on what I’d read of Theroux, I had a certain image of him. He stumped me with his warmth and the fabulous stories he had to tell. His train journey from Amritsar, his efforts to re-trace some of his earlier literary efforts. In fact, we ended up chatting for 30 minutes after the interview was over, it was moments like those that made everything magically special.

Jeffrey Archer was an engaging conversationalist, he minced no words. I asked him if he was interested in the Ubud Writers Festival, prompt came the reply, “only if the organizers know I don’t come cheap.”

Investment guru Jim Rogers dished out a lot of advice off air and signed off “get them before they get hot,” he was wrapping up some advice from his book ‘Hot Commodities.’ Some authors ended up becoming friends. Kunal Basu, Elmo Jayawardena, Meira Chand, Janet de Neefe, Kiran Desai and all of it wouldn’t have happened if not for the book segment.

5. You have also been closely associated with some of the biggest writers festival in the region, especially with those held at Ubud, Singapore, and Galle. How was the experience of meeting and talking to writers at these relatively new festivals? Can you please give us a peek behind the show, the process of organising a lit fest?

DS: Before I get to that, I’d like to talk about how my involvement at literary festivals happened. If anyone deserves credit for it, it has to be Janet de Neefe, the founder of the Ubud Writers Festival. We bumped into each other at a media conference that was organized for the Singapore Writers Festival in 2005. I was the only journalist asking questions after the speeches were done. Janet asked the PR person for an introduction and that afternoon we ended up talking for an hour and a half and we haven’t stopped since. She gave me her card, told me about her festival, how it was born, what she hoped it would achieve and I was fascinated by her commitment to use words to heal, to build bridges. Bali, which had suffered from the deadly bombings, needed to go in recovery mode and what better way to do it than through literature. I didn’t think anything would come out of our accidental meeting. The next thing I knew, Janet, the Festival Director was inviting me to her festival. She asked if I would moderate sessions at the festival. I told her doing a 10 minute segment for television was one thing, an hour long session with a live audience quite another, but I was willing to test the untested waters.

There were three sessions that were allocated to me. Then three weeks before the festival, Australian journalist Ramona Koval, who was supposed to do the one on one with Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje pulled out of the festival. Janet called me and asked if I’d do it. I still have no idea what made me say yes. Then it was lot of sleepless nights. Would I be able to pull this off? This is the Booker Prize winning author? Someone whose work I greatly admire. I finally got to meet Michael at the opening of the festival. I told him I’d never done this before. I still remember that moment, he put his hand on my shoulder, gave me him his warm smile and said, “it will be alright.” I couldn’t sleep the night before the session, I was reading, re-reading my script, my research, re-visiting some of Michael’s work, then when the moment arrived, it was time to erase all of that and get on with it. The session went beautifully. I had no idea there were some Australian festival directors in the audience. Soon, there were invites from Australia, the next year Libby Southwell, Festival Director of the Galle Literary Festival was there and she invited me for the inaugural festival in Galle. Of course, none of this would have happened, if my husband Bala wasn’t funding some of these trips, if my office wasn’t giving me permission to appear at the festivals and if my boss wasn’t convinced of the worth of bringing back stories that can only be born at a literary festival.

It’s a totally different dynamic interviewing authors in a live setting. The interviews are more relaxed. You can talk about more than just their latest book to give the audience a full insight into an author’s writing process. It’s amazing to see how different it is for different authors. Then it is the audience that makes the difference. They are always animated and one has to be aware that they often know more than you, sometimes they’ve even read more into an author’s work and could end up knowing more about a particular incident than the author does. I always look for ways to engage the audience beyond the official Q & A. It could be a reading, it could the official introduction, it could be a brief enactment of an author’s work. There are various ways of doing it, one just has to be able to gauge what an audience would like. It’s often a blink moment and over the years I’ve been fortunate to catch it.

6. Apart from these festivals in the Asia Pacific region, India too has been hosting festivals like Kitab in Bombay and the Jaipur writers festival. Do you think these festivals are fads or marketing driven events? Or have they emerged because there is a genuine love for literature in the hearts of the organisers?

DS: Since I haven’t attended Kitab or the Jaipur Writers Festival, I’m not in a position to comment on them. What I can say not just about literary festivals but about everything else in life is that anything that is done with passion, with love, with commitment, anything that is truly Dil Se will find a way of speaking for itself, it will rise above the rest, the audience will relate to it as much as the writers themselves.

Literary festivals are a great way of connecting writers with their readers. Amitav Ghosh said this to me at Ubud. “I spend the better part of my life working on my book, when I get to a festival it’s amazing to see what has resonated with the readers.” It’s almost a way of bringing the writers out of their study, to feel one with their readers. Before literary festivals, readings, book signings became the thing that they are today, what did we have to go on? A writer, his book, a critic and his or her take on it. Today, you have the entire blogosphere at your disposal, just as you choose your writers, you can choose your critics too. What I am saying is literary festivals have opened a whole new avenue for dialogue, for interaction, for healthy criticism or even for bringing your literary heroes into real life. And in this case, too much could actually be a good thing.

7. You have interviewed writers both in front of the camera (recorded) and at festivals (live). How are the two processes different?

DS :Very different. At festivals, often the writers don’t even know the cameras are rolling. They are totally at ease with themselves. The studio often has an unsettling effect. I’ve seen the best of writers clam up, looking in vastly different angles, going on for too long or not saying enough. Being in a live setting also gives you the added advantage of getting a readers reaction to what the author has said. Visually, I’ve found festival coverage a lot more interesting. And I’ve enjoyed the whole process of filming the festival, scripting the story and showing all that happened in a tightly woven television narrative.

8. What kind of preparation and research do you have to do to interview writers? What it takes to engage with minds like Michael Ondaatje, Kiran Desai, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, etc?

DS: It starts with the reading of their work. As a moderator, you’ve got to ensure you’ve read and comprehended the author’s work. At the risk of repeating myself, going with the assumption that the audience always knows more than you do. Checking and counter-checking facts. Don’t believe everything that shows up on Google. Double check the reports. Exchange emails with the authors, meet them before the session. It’s always good to know whether they want to do a reading, how you would connect the reading with a question. Prepare for it 200%, then go with the flow. Study the audience reaction while the conversation is on. You get a sense of what they want more of and what they’d like less of. Beyond the session itself, there is the other dimension of managing the Q & A.

I had a really interesting experience at the Galle Literary Festival. This was after the session with Kiran Desai. When I opened the floor up for questions, there was a sea of hands. The very first question on the ending of the book as was the second. When it came to the third question, I had to put my foot down and tell the audience that if there were any more questions about the ending of the book, they would have to talk to Kiran about it after the session. I’ve found the ending of ‘The Inheritance of Loss’ very clever. You can take what you want to take from it. Without giving too much, I said that much and added that discussing the ending wasn’t being fair to all the people who had bought the book. It was like going to a movie knowing what would happen next.

9. You not only interview writers but you are also a prolific reviewer of books as readers can gauge from you book blog, Read@Peace. What were the most stimulating reads for you in 2007? In fiction and non-fiction?

DS: I enjoyed very much ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘A Golden Age’ by Tahmima Anam, ‘Mister Pip’ by Lloyd Jones, ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ by Mohsin Hamid, ‘The Yacoubian Building’ by Alaa al Aswany, ‘The Blood of Flowers’ by Anita Amerazzvani, ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ by Khaled Hosseini, ‘The Last Nizam’ by John Zubryzcki, Adib Khan’s ‘Spiral Road’, Richard Flanagan’s ‘The Unknown Terrorist,’ Christopher Merrill’s ‘Things of the Hidden God,’ Tan Twan Eng’s ‘The Gift of Rain,’ Hari Kunzru’s ‘My Revolutions,’ Anupama Chopra’s ‘King of Bollywood’ – gosh this is turning out to be the Queen of longlists. I had better resist the temptation of adding on more.

10. And who are the Asian writers to watch out for in the new year?

DS: Start that with Tahmima Anam. ‘A Golden Age’ is bound to figure prominently in the award lists. Also watch closely, Preeta Samarasan from Malaysia whose book ‘Evening is The Whole Day’ will be out next year. Chandrahas Choudhry has finished his novel. I’ll be looking out closely for that. There’s poet Tishani Doshi whose novel is expected to be out soon as well. From Singapore, look out for Balli Kaur, who won the prestigious T K Wong Fellowship. She’s currently at the University of East Anglia, in UK, working on her debut novel.

I’ll also be eagerly awaiting Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth,’ Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Sea of Poppies,’ Manil Suri’s ‘The Age of Shiva’ and Hanif Kureishi’s ‘Something to Tell You’ and of course Kunal Basu’s collection of short stories – ‘The Japanese Wife.’

The reading’s only just begun. Here’s to flipping lots of pages in 2008.

An edited version of this interview appeared in India Se, June 2008.