novelist
Reema Vohra
The author of The Tin Almirah on writing rooms instead of plots.
Interviews
Cover stories and conversations with the people behind the books on the reviews desk — novelists, poets, memoirists, and the occasional bookkeeper-narrator. The point is the working life: how a manuscript left a drawer, what the second book cost in time.
memoirist
Aakash Dev Sharma
On writing a childhood memoir where the most reliable narrator isn't the author.
short story writer
Priyanka Oberoi
On writing a second book set in the same fictional Mumbai chawl.
debut novelist
Tarun Sen
A former consular employee turned novelist on writing The Embassy of Small Countries.
essayist
Naina Kapadia
On researching Spectrum and the Second City city by city.
novelist and historian
Meher Dastur
On choosing a warehouse ledger over a train platform to tell a Partition story.
poet
Kabir Anand
On organising a heartbreak collection like a birdwatcher's index.
crime novelist
Devashish Rao
On writing a detective who investigates a case he was once ordered to close.
novelist
Farah Contractor
On keeping the deities offstage in a mythology retelling.
novelist
Omkar Deshpande
On writing an affectionate comedy about remarriage in middle age.
debut novelist
Lakshmi Iyengar
On resisting both the burnout plot and the escape plot in a call-centre novel.
novelist
Zara Pinto
On a cartographer heroine who abandons her own commission.
memoirist
Siddharth Wagle
On reconstructing a family archive that was deliberately destroyed.
novelist
Anjali Sarin
On a speechwriter novel that keeps its political targets deliberately generic.
novelist
Nandita Suri
On structuring a three-generation family saga by which room the arguments happen in.