| November Issue This issue is jam packed with interviews. In our last update of the year, we hope to leave you inspired to write and with plenty of great advice from the authors who have made it. Check out our blog for more interviews with Roopa Farooki Farahad Zama Preeta Samarasan Nikita Lalwani A perfect ten In the hot seat with Nasreen Akhtar
1) In your quest for love did you ever think that it was going to be such an emotional rollercoaster? Never could I have imagined it to be so. The depth of human emotion is amazing! 2) Did you write the book as you went along, or did you write it later? In its entirety, the book was written over a period of just over 4 months. Some of the instances were vivid in my mind simply because they are unforgettable. Ultimately with each encounter, each experience, I grew as a human being; as a woman, so it wasn’t too difficult to recall. 3) Was writing the book a painful journey in itself, and what made you share your story? The actual writing of the whole book was a great journey and carries
on being so. There were some parts that were painful to have to relive.
I remember when I wrote chapters Seven to Ten, I fell ill and I
discussed it with Varsha, telling her unwell I had become all of a
sudden. ‘Nasreen, that was a difficult time in your life,’ she said to
me. I wanted to share this story because if we are to aid understanding cross-cultures and break down the barriers that exist in contemporary British society, there needs to be access to people’s realities. Stories provide the best access to the minds and lives of others. This book is about the world through one woman’s eyes and if it can add to knowledge of people, of love, of faith and of the soul, then that hopefully will bring people together, irrespective to who they are. 4) You worked with Yasmin Ali Brown, and she’s very supportive of you and your work in the foreword, what was that experience like? People touch us in different ways. Sometimes without ever knowing us. About seven years ago, I read Ms Alibhai-Brown’s column in the Independent and there were a few lines that settled in my heart and mind. From then on, I would ensure that I read her column without fail. I thought she was wonderful. And then fate made us cross paths. I remember the first day that I went to work with her, she was on the way to dropping off a family member somewhere, and she asked me to wait until she got back. I headed towards the door as I was going to wait outside the house until she returned. She wouldn’t hear of it and left me to sit on that infamous red sofa of hers (!). She left me alone in her beautiful house; me - a total stranger. This I can never forget. Ever. The acknowledgement to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown at the back of the book says it all. 5) And how is your quest going now? Have you found Mr Right? I am not looking. There is an extraordinary guy but I do not know if he will be mine. Time will tell if my boat will make it to shore or if it will sink in the water! 6) You published this, using your own imprint Greenbirds. As a writer, what made you decide to set up your own publishing business? It was actually the other way around. I started as a publisher who took a financial risk on her own work. Sometimes all you need is a chance; what can be better than giving yourself a chance? 7) What can we hope to see from Greenbirds in the future? All will depend on how this current title does. 8 ) And is there a sequel to this book? What are you working on now? There may be a sequel, I haven’t decided for sure. I keep being
asked for the next book, it’s unbelievable! I am not sure if there
should be a sequel to this book. I have thought about it but there is a
big question mark over whether I will ever publish it. 9) What advice would you give to an aspiring novelist, as well as someone on the quest to find their one true love? Believe in yourself, know yourself, respect yourself. Because if you cannot do any of these, no-one else can do it for you. 10) Good luck on being nominated for the World Book Day Read, what do you hope to get out of it? (So kind, thank you.) I hope to show that anything is achievable with a little hard work, determination and inner drive. That if one wishes to touch great heights, there is no reason why that should not be within reach. Nasreen Akhtar holds a postgraduate degree in Linguistics from Goldsmith’s College, University of London. She is the proprietor of the publishing imprint greenbirds. She was born in 1974 and came to the UK with her Pakistani parents when she was 4 years of age. Her book Catch a Fish from the Sea (Using the Internet) has been long listed for The Book to Talk About Award 2009 for World Book Day, the biggest annual celebration of books and reading in the UK.
The | November 2008: The Asian Writer  Tishani Doshi was born in Madras to a Welsh mother and a Gujarati father, and is based in India, after periods living in America and England. Her first book of poems, Countries of the Body won the 2006 Forward prize for best first collection. She was the winner of the 2006 All-India Poetry Competition, and a finalist in the Outlook-Picador Non-fiction competition in 2005. Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2009. Currently underway is a second volume of poetry and a biography of the Sri Lankan cricketer Muttiah Muralitharan. The Asian Writer caught up with Tishani to find out more about the talented young artist.Tell me more about your journey as a writer? I guess I started thinking of myself as a writer when I was in my early 20s. I was in university in America at the time, and it was the first time I really felt that it was okay to choose being a poet as a vocation! I’ve always loved words. I used to keep journals and write letters, and I think it was a very natural progression for me, to start with poems and experiment with different forms. I’ve spent 3-4 months a year here over the last 6 years and even lived in London for a couple of years before that, so London is very much a second home. But the place that I consider home, is Madras. What is it like being a visiting writer? Do you feel connected to your audience and is it different from being at home? I’ve always enjoyed being the visitor. The outsider. I think it’s a position that the writer assumes naturally wherever they are. So I feel like a visitor even when I’m home. It gives you that slightly angled stance from which you can view the world – and I think it’s an important thing to have as a writer. As for connection with audiences – I suppose it all depends. I’ve performed as a dancer and as a poet in many places, and of course, with dance the wonderful thing is that you don’t need language, so the response is and can be visceral – but with poetry, I feel sometimes, the constraint of language. I write in English, so for people who don’t understand English, it relies on translations etc – so, in that sense, it’s slightly limiting. What do you hope to achieve over the course of this year? I’ve only just had the final draft of my novel approved, so I’d hope mainly that I can just file that away and begin something new. The prospect is quite daunting because I’ve spent 6 years with this book, but the hope is that something will bloom! Your debut novel is published next year, are you nervous about it at all? Yes and no. In a sense, with a first book, you’re going in with a very different/fresh approach. Nobody is judging you by any previous work and the work when judged, will stand on its own. I’m curious to see how it’s perceived, more than anything else, but like I said, when you spend so long with something, you begin to lose sight of what other people think. You did the work you had to do, and then you move on. I’d be far more nervous about the second one I think. Could you give us a little flavour of what to expect from your first novel? Well – I suppose it’s a little poetic and a little funny and a little sad and a little dreamy all at the same time. You’re an acclaimed poet, moving into the novel format - how was that transition for you? Or is it all just good writing for you? I always knew that I wanted to tell this story – it’s loosely based on the love story of my parents (welsh woman meets Indian man in the 60s etc). So I knew this was going to develop at some point in my writing career. It took a long time because I’m not used to fiction at all – I find it takes a different set of skills entirely. A lot of stamina, for one, which you don’t really need for poetry. And the ability to contain this entire universe in your head. Poetry is so much more containable. It’s this one intense act, filled with a lot of joy and obsessive ness and bouts of despair – but ultimately the process is entirely different. There is the “inspired” moment, whereas with fiction writing – it’s a lot of let’s just get on with it. It’s been a very interesting journey for me though. And while I’d say that my first instinct is still for poetry, I’ve learned a bit about the secret architectures of novels – and there’s something terribly lovely about that too. What's next for you as a writer? I’m halfway through a new book of poems, and I’ve been making notes for a new novel for some months now. Short stories too. I have about 10 of them lying around in different stages of completion. What advice would you give to our readers, many of whom aspire to being published? Read, write and persist. What or who has had a major influence on you, and your writing? When I was 25 I met a woman called Chandralekha who was then 73. She was a writer, dancer, painter, feminist all rolled into one, and I was to work with her for 6 years until her passing. She made a dancer of me, which I thought was quite amazing – because it wasn’t something I was looking for, and it added a very different dimension to my personality. But more than that, she embodied this idea of art and life, not separating between them. I spent many evenings in her home, literally every day for six years, listening and talking to the people who came through – writers, painters, filmmakers, mango-growers, heart surgeons – and I understood something of interconnectedness, the need for no compartments… more importantly though, I understood the discipline it takes to be an artist, any kind of artist, a daily dedication to your craft, which I never really practised before. So all this had much more of an effect on my writing than reading say, Joyce or Neruda or something like that. I mean, sure, different writers speak to you from beyond the grave or the page – and you connect with them and it inspires you undoubtedly – but for me, I’ve always thought, meeting Chandra was the turning point in my life because it made me understand how an artist must or can live, which is not something you necessarily get by reading books. What has writing taught you as a person, and what do you hope that people get from your work? It’s taught me that I’m inherently a very lazy person and that I have to overcome this every single day. It’s taught me that I’m incredibly lucky to know what I love, so rather than spend the rest of my life about thinking – what is it that I really love to do? I only have to spend the rest of my life thinking how I can make a living doing what I love to do. And as far as what people get from it – what can I say? Some kind of connection. To feel that it wasn’t a total waste of their time. Leave some word or sentence or idea knocking about in their heads for some time to come – yes, that would be nice.  | On meeting... Tahmima AnamI meet with Tahmima Anam minutes after she has given a reading - at the SAMA festival – we have only ten minutes – so I quickly rush through the questions. I’m struck at how petite she is, there is an elegant poise about her. Without warning we are interrupted by a passer by. We both apologise, even though none of its our fault and then I begin the interview… Anam spent two years in Bangladesh researching A Golden Age. I asked her about her time there and whether at any point she felt like a foreigner in her homeland. ‘No’ she says ‘People responded very well and although I didn’t grow up in Bangladesh my family are still living there, and I’m very much connected to the country so I never felt like that. I never experienced and hostility and people really felt like I was trying my best to bring a historical moment that was really important to them.’ I notice how her accent changes, as she speaks, its difficult to make out which region her accent is from, but she always manages to pronounce Bangladesh like a native. This year alone A Golden Age was shortlistted for three major literary prizes, before winning the Overall First Book Award at the Commonwealth Prize, in doing so, Anam became the first Bangladeshi to ever win the award. But she is ever so modest about how well A Golden Age has done across the world. ‘It was a pleasant surprise to me, I’m, delighted.’ A Golden Age has been positive across Bangladesh too, as Anam explains ‘People really welcomed the opportunity to read about an important event in their lives and their parents lives.’ Their only disappointment being that Anam chose to write the book in English, not Bangla. In the reading session she talked about how A Golden Age came about. It was not the novel she had always imagined she would write, which was a great war epic, but of a family. I ask her what she wanted to write about and whether, combining war and domesticity were a conscious decision. ‘Definitely I wanted to write about the political moment but also which focussed on the everyday lives of ordinary people, of a woman who wasn’t somebody you would expect to be a war hero, but ends up doing something really heroic things, so the sort unexpected element of that, really appealed to me.’ The story of Rehana is loosely based on Anam’s grandmother, who was considered a revolutionary during the war and used her home as a safe house for freedom fighters. So little has been written about the subject in novels that I ask Anam whether this was her way of uniting differing opinions. ‘Its very personal’ she says. ‘I think it’s a very subjective thing, its not the truth of the event. Its the story about a family, and my way of depicting that time. So its certainly one story but its not the only story.’ She strikes me as a young author who is deeply moved by what happened to her home nation. Earlier in the session, Anam confessed that for much of her early life she refused to visit the country. It is now that she is older, that she has been able to visit Pakistan and have her earlier misconceptions deeply challenged. I move on to how she feels, being compared to writers, like Monica Ali and Zadie smith. ‘You always feel like you need to fit into some sort of category but I think Brick Lane and White Teeth are very good books and I would be happy to be compared to them. But it would probably be more apt to compare me with people who write about their own countries too, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who writes about Nigeria.’ Our time is drawing to a close, so I quickly ask her one final question. What advice would you give to an aspiring novelist? ‘I would encourage them to find a story that they feel very strongly about and focus on that, and get regular feedback on what they write, whether it’s a parent or a friend, or a teacher and not to be shy about what they are writing.’ I thank her for her time. It was a pleasure to meet such a passionate young writer.
|