An international literary journal specialising in well-researched, in-depth interviews with writers in all literary genres, concentrating on their work, their ideas and related matters. ISSN: 2203-4293
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Andrew Wilson, published as A.N. Wilson, is a British writer of fiction, non-fiction and journalism. Beginning his career as an acclaimed comic novelist in the late 1970s, his work has since embraced literary biography, history, and novels that have moved beyond comedy to encompass faith and historical settings. In 2007 his novel Winnie and Wolf was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize; his most recent work is the acclaimed literary biography The Mystery of Charles Dickens. Nick Turner conducted the interview with Andrew Wilson by email in April 2020, focusing on the Andrew Wilson’s diverse writing interests, the work of Iris Murdoch, his new book on Dickens, the appeal of the Victorian age, and the writers that have inspired him in the past.
Copyright (c) 2020 Nicholas Turner http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
E.M. Reapy was born in 1984 and raised in Claremorris, Co. Mayo, Ireland. She was educated at NUI-Galway, University College Cork, and Queen’s University Belfast where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing. In addition to other non-writing jobs, Elizabeth spent eighty-eight days working on an orange farm in the Australian Outback in order to secure a two-year visa to live and work in Australia – experiences that resulted in Red Dirt, her highly-acclaimed first novel. For Red Dirt, Reapy received the prestigious 2017 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, an award for a body of work by a young Irish writer showing exceptional promise. Skin, her second novel, also shares an Australian setting, among others. I met E.M. Reapy for the first time when we read together for the ‘Over the Edge’ Reading Series at the Galway City Library in 2018. On that occasion, Elizabeth read two beautiful short prose fiction pieces. Of course I had heard of her acclaimed first novel Red Dirt but had not yet read it. The next day I went into Charlie Byrne’s and bought a copy of the novel. A primary focus of my research through the decades has been on the literature of the Irish diaspora and I was excited to read Reapy’s exploration of the lives of the young Irish who had left home and moved to Australia, most on short-term visas, in the wake of the 2008 recession that caused the collapse of the Irish economy and, for all intents and purposes, bankrupted Ireland. I found Red Dirt to be terrific in every respect: beautifully realized, terrifying in places, always absorbing, and moving. Reapy’s second novel, Skin, while quite different from Red Dirt, is equally important in its intense exploration of how difficult it can be for a person to live in her skin. After Dr. Gillian Dooley has heard me deliver a paper on E.M. Reapy’s work at the Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand (ISAANZ), she asked me to interview Elizabeth for Writers in Conversation. The interview was conducted by email (January-April 2020).
Copyright (c) 2020 Eamonn Wall http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca was born in Bombay to Prof. Nissim Ezekiel and Daisy Ezekiel. She was raised in a Bene-Israel Jewish family in Bombay, India.* She attended Queen Mary’s School, St. Xavier’s College, Bombay University and Oxford Brookes University, U.K. She holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English, American Literature and Education. Her career spanned over four decades in Indian colleges, American International Schools and Canada, teaching English, French and Spanish. She also held the position of Career Counsellor at the International School in India, where she taught Advanced Placement and other courses in English for sixteen years. She is a published poet. Her first book, Family Sunday and other Poems, was published in 1989, with a second edition in 1990. She has read her poems over All India Radio Bombay, and her poems have also appeared in Poetry India, SETU Magazine, Muse India and Destiny Poets, UK, to name a few. She has her poetry page at https://www.facebook.com/kemendoncapoetry. Kavita also writes short fiction. Her work is strongly influenced by her father’s work. (The late Nissim Ezekiel was an eminent poet, well-known in India and overseas). She lives in Calgary, Canada, with her family. This interview was conducted via emails in the rainy days of June 2020.
Copyright (c) 2020 Basudhara Roy, Jaydeep Sarangi http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Dr Raphael d’Abdon is a writer, scholar, spoken word poet, editor and translator. In 2007 he complied, translated and edited I nostri semi/Peo tsa rona, an anthology of contemporary South African poetry. In 2011 he translated into Italian (with Lorenzo Mari) Bless Me Father, the autobiography of South African poet Mario d’Offizi. In 2013, he compiled and edited the collection Marikana: A Moment in Time. He is the author of three collections of poems, sunnyside nightwalk (Johannesburg: Geko, 2013), salt water (Johannesburg: Poetree Publishing, 2016) and the bitter herb (East London: The Poets Printery, 2018), and he has read his poetry in South Africa, Nigeria, Somaliland, Italy, Sweden and the USA. His poems are published in journals, magazines and anthologies in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, Singapore, Palestine, India, Italy, Canada, USA and UK, he is South Africa’s representative of AHN (Africa Haiku Network), and he is a member of ZAPP (The South African Poetry Project) and IPP (International Poetry Project), two joint-projects of the University of Cambridge, UNISA and the University of the Witwatersrand, whose chief aims are to promote poetry in schools in South Africa, UK and beyond, and to instill knowledge, understanding and a love of poetry in young learners. This interview is conducted through e mails in the months of April-May 2020 when Corona virus ravished the world. We saw light through the wings of poesy. We reached out each other through questions and answers about poetry, life and the immediate.
Copyright (c) 2020 Jaydeep Sarangi http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Kalyani Thakur Charal is a cyclonic Dalit feminist and social activist. She wants to be known as a Dalit womanist who believes that writing is an act of resistance. She has four collections of poems, one autobiography and three collections of essays. She edits a cultural magazine, Nir. Her works are translated into English and many of them are on University syllabuses. This interview is the outcome of the meetings we have in Kolkata in last four months. The interview was originally conducted in Bangla.
Copyright (c) 2020 Jaydeep Sarangi, Jaydeep Sarangi, Bidisha Pal http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Bessie Head’s international reputation – as novelist, short-story writer, essayist and chronicler – brought her to Australia in 1984, primarily for Adelaide’s Writers’ Week but also to visit Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart. In Adelaide, in February, she was interviewed by Suzanne Hayes of the College of Technical and Further Education. The following month, in Launceston, she was interviewed by Andrew Peek of the Tasmanian College of Adult Education. Both interviews are re-printed here: first, Peek’s, minimally re-edited (the original audio recording appears not to be extant), and second, Hayes’, edited anew from its original recording. Over a third of a century has passed since then, but Head’s voice rings out to us with a lamentably contemporary relevance: ‘choked’, as she tells Hayes, in a white-dominated South Africa, where she lived for the first twenty-seven years of her life, and then alienated in Botswana as a refugee and as a female writer of ‘mixed race’, ‘deprived all round’.
Copyright (c) 2020 Dorothy Driver http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Making the sentences sing: an interview with Anna Goldsworthy
Dr Anna Goldsworthy is one of Australia’s foremost concert pianists, a founding member of the Seraphim Trio, and a Research Fellow of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. She is also a distinguished writer, the author of two books: Piano Lessons (2009), a memoir of her musical education and her relationship with her teacher, Eleonora Sivan; and Welcome to your New Life (2014), a memoir describing the arrival of her first child. She has adapted Piano Lessons for the stage, and also co-written a play with her father, Peter Goldsworthy, based on his novel Maestro (1989). She has also written many essays, including cultural and literary criticism. Given my own interests in music and literature and how the two art forms intersect and overlap, Anna’s dual career has always been an inspiration for me. I met her in her office at the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide in November 2016.
Copyright (c) 2017 Gillian Dooley https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Professor Joost Daalder taught in the English Department at Flinders University from 1976 until his retirement in 2001, mostly in the area of English Renaissance literature. Prior to that, he taught at the University of Otago (New Zealand) from 1966 to 1976. He has an impressive list of publications, including several scholarly editions of Renaissance literary texts and many journal articles, book chapters, and reviews. See http://www.flinders.edu.au/ehl/englishandcreativewriting/staff/joost-daalder-pub.cfm for a complete list. Joost was born in the Netherlands in 1939, and studied at Amsterdam University and Edinburgh University before moving to New Zealand with his wife Truus in 1966. Joost and Truus have an interest in collecting fine arts, and in 2017 donated the Daalder Contemporary Jewellery Collection to the Art Gallery of South Australia. They also often lend art objects to other institutions for exhibitions. Truus is known for her books on the visual arts, notably her Ethnic Jewellery and Adornment (2009). I first knew Joost as a lecturer when I was studying Honours in English in the mid-1990s – he was an inspiring teacher of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Since then we have become friends and colleagues and it seems fitting to mark his 80th birthday with an in-depth conversation about his professional career. The interview was conducted via email in September and October 2019.
Copyright (c) 2020 Gillian Dooley http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
An interview with a reputed writer from the North East India. Mamang Dai is a significant Indian English poet and novelist from Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh. She was correspondent with the Hindustan Times, Telegraph and Sentinel newspapers and President, Arunachal Pradesh Union of Working Journalists. She also worked with World Wide Fund for nature in the Eastern Himalaya Biodiversity Hotspots programme. She has received the Verrier Elwin Award from the State government of Arunachal Pradesh (2003) and Padma Shri from the Government of India (2011). Mamang Dai’s books include: Arunachal Pradesh: The Hidden Land (non-fiction, 2003/2009); The Legends of Pensam (novel, 2006); The Sky Queen and Once Upon a Moontime (illustrated folklore for young readers, 2003); Stupid Cupid (novel, 2008); Mountain Harvest: The Food of Arunachal (non-fiction, 2004); River Poems (2004); and The Black Hill (novel, 2014); Hambreelsai’s Loom (2014): El bálsamo del tiempo/The balm of time (bilingual poetry edition, 2008); Midsummer Survival Lyrics (poetry, 2014).
Copyright (c) 2017 Jaydeep Sarangi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Revelations of a Pantheistic Poet: Dr K.V. Dominic in Conversation
Dr K.V. Dominic, English poet, critic, short story writer and editor, is a retired professor of the Post Graduate & Research Department of English, Newman College, Thodupuzha, Kerala, India. He was born in 1956 at Kalady, a holy place in Kerala where Adi Sankara, the philosopher who consolidated the doctrine of Advaita Vedanta, was born. He took his PhD on the topic ‘East-West Conflicts in the Novels of R. K. Narayan’ from Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala. In addition to innumerable poems, short stories and critical articles published in national and international journals, he has authored/edited thirty books so far. Another poetry book of Dominic translated into French by Dominique Demiscault is in the process of being published in France. Prof. Dominic is the Secretary of Guild of Indian English Writers, Editors and Critics (GIEWEC). He has conducted several national seminars and workshops all over India. He is one of the writers of the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) countries’ magazine and participant of SAARC literary festivals. He is the editor and publisher of the international refereed biannual journal, International Journal on Multicultural Literature (IJML) and Editor-in-Chief of the GIEWEC’s international refereed biannual journal, Writers Editors Critics (WEC). He is also the publisher of the international refereed annual, New Fiction Journal (NFJ). International Poets Academy, Chennai conferred on him its highest award in 2009; The India Inter-Continental Cultural Association, Chandigarh conferred on him the Kafla Inter-continental Award of Honour Sahitya Shiromani in recognition of his contribution in the field of literature at the 10th International Writers' Festival at Trivandrum (Kerala) in 2014.
Copyright (c) 2017 Goutam Karmakar, Goutam Karmakar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Interview of Dr. Gail Omvedt by Dr. B.N. Gaikwad and Sumeet R. Patil, conducted on 14 March 2016 in the University of Mumbai Campus, Vidyanagri, Santacruz East, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.D Dr Gail Omvedt is an American-born scholar, who has obtained her Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley in 1973. Dr. Omvedt has devoted her life to Dr Ambedkar’s anti-caste movement, Shramik Mukti Dal, Stri Mukti Sangharsh Chalval, the women’s movement and social work since becoming a citizen of India in 1983. She has also authored several books and published, which helps people associated with Dalit literature and Movement. This interview was conducted during the visit of Dr Omvedt and Dr Bharat Patankar to Vidyanagri, Kalina Campus, Santacruz, Mumbai University on 14 March 2016.
Copyright (c) 2017 Sumeet Ravindra Patil https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Subodh Sarkar’s first book of poem was published in the late 1970s, and now he has 26 books to his credit – 20 of poems, two of translations and one travelogue on America. His poems have been translated into English, French and several Indian languages and published in several journals and anthologies. Sarkar is the editor of Bhashanagar, a Bengali culture magazine with occasional English issues. He is the guest editor of Indian Literature, New Delhi. He is a recipient of the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award (2013).
A Severed Text: Artist Carol Sommer discusses her responses to Iris Murdoch's Novels with Frances White
Carol Sommer is an artist based in Darlington, UK with an interest in Process Art. She is engaged in a project using the works of novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch in innovative ways. Her book Cartography for Girls: A-Z of Orientations Identified within the Novels of Iris Murdoch was published by Information as Material in 2016. The following discussion of the relationship between textual process and subjectivity in her responses to the novels of iris Murdoch arose out of conversations that Carol and I have had over the years, and my deep interest in her philosophy and methodology which are so different from mainline Iris Murdoch scholarship. The interview was conducted by email in April 2017.
Copyright (c) 2017 Frances White https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
With Cristobal Perez Barra (Chile), Peter Bergsma (The Netherlands), Reinhild Böhnke (Germany), Miguel Temprano Garcia (Spain) and Jinghui Wang (China). It was my privilege to be asked to chair a panel on translating J.M. Coetzee at the very end of the ‘Reading Coetzee’s Women’ Conference held at the Monash Campus in Prato, Italy from 27 to 29 September 2016, and now, to present an account of that occasion which contains versions, either of the papers presented at the meeting itself by three of the four invited participants who were able to attend, or submitted to me by two others who could not. The text of the contributions has been very lightly edited by me on the few occasions where it seemed this might help to convey the writer’s meaning with maximum clarity in idiomatic contemporary English, and then submitted to the author for approval. In the same way a draft of the following essay as a whole has been submitted to all the participants for comment or suggested amendment. The result, I hope, is that this essay can be considered in large measure as collaborative work – or, indeed, a conversation. Inevitably, the range of languages covered here is very partial, and indeed, a matter of chance. Before the conference began we were worried that, as a result of participants accepting and then finding themselves forced to withdraw and send in messages to be read on their behalf, real live translators would be rather thin on the ground, reduced to stalwart representatives from Holland and Italy. But we were in luck, discovering as conference delegates arrived that among them were two more Coetzee translators. Furthermore, these were of special interest: representing China and South America respectively, they would enable us to move out beyond the Eurocentric focus originally envisaged. Since both of them kindly agreed to take part at very short notice, we could go a little further than we had hoped, offering a glimpse of the world reception of a writer who, unquestionably, already belongs in his lifetime to Goethean Weltliteratur.
Copyright (c) 2018 Michael Hollington https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reviving Indigenous Spaces: Echoes of a Native Spirit - An Interview with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is an indigenous (Missisuaga Nishnaabeg) writer, musician and academician. She is notable as the author of several books and papers on indigenous issues in Canada, and for her work with the 2012 'Idle No More' protests. Leanne released her first album of poetry and music called Islands of Decolonial Love in conjunction with a book of poetry and short stories of the same name in 2013 with ARP Books. She signed with RPM records, the first indigenous contemporary music label in June 2016, and her second album Flight released on September 30, 2016. Simpson is a member of Alderville First Nation. She writes about contemporary indigenous issues and realities, particularly from her own 'Anishinaabe' nation across a variety of genres. Simpson has collaborated with a variety of indigenous and non-indigenous musicians to record and perform stories as song. She regularly performs live with a core group of musicians consisting of Cris Derksen Nick Ferrio and Ansley Simpson. In this interview she talks about the importance of preserving and reviving indigenous geo-political spaces to decolonize the global contemporary patterns of knowledge production.
Copyright (c) 2018 Jonnelle Walker https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Three Decades of Bangla Dalit Movement: Jaydeep Sarangi in Conversation with Kapilkrishna Thakur
Kapilkrishna Thakur is long standing Bangla Dalit activist and writer working for more than three decades. His signal books include: Ujantaleer Upokatha (historical novel), Cholechi Chaitrer Utsabee, Shoro Pathor, Kisundar Ondho (poetry), Madhumoti Onek Dur, Onno Ihudi (Stories). He has also written a seminal book on the Motua Movement in Bengal which marks his scholarship in the subject. Matua Andolan o Banglar Anunnoto Samaj is resourceful work on Matua religion and literary productions. Kapilkrishna Thakur is also attached to some important journals and magazines from West Bengal: Dalit Manan, Nikhil Bharat, Bngo Bhumi, Gana Sanskriti, Jamini Katha and Manisha. His literary corpus makes a fervent plea for a complete overhaul of society by questioning all stereotyped notions of caste and class in Bengal. This interview is the fruit of a couple of long sessions in August 2017 in a coffee parlour in South Kolkata, Prince Anwar Shah Road.
Copyright (c) 2018 Jaydeep Sarangi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Bama (born 1958), also known as Bama Faustina Soosairaj, is a Tamil, Dalit feminist, teacher and writer. Her autobiographical novel Karukku (1992) chronicles the joys and sorrows experienced by Dalit Christian women in Tamil Nadu. She subsequently wrote two more novels, Sangati (1994) and Vanmam (2002) along with two collections of short stories: Kusumbukkaran (1996) and Oru Tattvum Erumaiyum (2003). Bama was born as Faustina Mary Fatima Rani in a Roman Catholic family from Puthupatti in the then Madras State. Later she adopted 'Bama' as her pen name. Susairaj was her father and Sebasthiamma, her mother. Bama's novels focus on caste and gender discrimination. She propagates Dalit feminism through her writings.
Will Self is a renowned British author, cultural thinker, journalist, broadcaster, and psychogeographer. He has authored ten novels, most recently Shark (2014) and Phone (2017); five collections of shorter fiction, and several volumes of nonfiction, most recently The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker (2012). Self has been translated into over 20 languages. His novel Umbrella (2012) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has frequently published in many periodicals including the Guardian, Harper's, the New York Times, the New Statesman, and London Review of Books. He is a regular presenter or panelist on BBC television shows and BBC Radio 4. His first book of short fiction, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He won the Agha Khan Prize for Fiction for Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998), and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction for The Butt (2008). In 2007, M. Hunter Hayes published Understanding Will Self on the subject of his life and work. Self is Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University, London. This interview was conducted at the bar of the India Club Restaurant, Strand Continental Hotel, London.
Copyright (c) 2018 Arup K Chatterjee https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Umm Zakiyyah is one of the most prominent African-American Muslim writers writing about Muslims and Islam in the post-9/11 period. Her novels touch on the interfaith struggles of Muslims and Christians in a post-modern world and on the moral, spiritual and intercultural struggles of Muslims as minorities in a country where Muslims have been systematically marginalised after twin-tower attacks in 2001 and the subsequent American invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). She also writes about racism, women’s issues, the practice of Muslim women wearing headscarfs, and polygamy. In this interview, Umm Zakiyyah talks about her favourite writers, about the function of the writer in general, about the critical reception of her novels and about the influence of Islam on her imagination. She also addresses the issues of Islamophobia in the West, the future of Islamic fiction and questions pertaining to If I Should Speak and other novels.
Copyright (c) 2018 Mohammad A. Quayum https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
‘Time writes its own script ...’ A Conversation with Sharmila Ray.
Sharmila Ray is an Indian poet and non-fiction essayist writing in English, anthologised and featured in India and abroad. Her poems, short stories and non-fictional essays have appeared in various national and international magazines and journals since the late 1990s. She is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of History at City College, Kolkata. She was on the English Board of Sahitya Akademi. She was the editor of The Journal (Poetry Society India) and looked after a column ‘Moving Hand Writes’, Times of India, Kolkata. Currently she is the vice-president of the Intercultural Poetry Performance Library, Kolkata and a Board Member of the Poetry Society India. She writes in English and has authored nine books of poetry (listed below). She also writes on Partition and her articles have been published in Bengal Past and Present and Glimpses of Partition in South Asian Fiction: A Critical Re-Interpretation, edited by Farzana S. Ali. She has conducted poetry workshops organized by British Council, the Poetry Society of India and Sahitya Akademi. She has read her poems at various poetry festivals in India. She had been invited to International Struga Poetry Evenings in Macedonia, where she represented India, and International Poets Meet in Kerala to share the stage with Ben Okri. She was the only poet writing in English from West Bengal to participate in VAK –the first poetry biennial held in New Delhi (2017). Her poems have been translated into Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Manipuri, Slovene, Hebrew and Spanish. Currently she is working on a manuscript of non-fictional essays and poetry. The interview took place at ICCR, Kolkata during our meeting in the month of April 2018.
Copyright (c) 2018 Jaydeep Sarangi, JAYDEEP SARANGI https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Nick Papadimitriou is a British author, whose widely acclaimed novel Scarp was published in 2013. He is also the author of Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Barnet, Finchley and Hendon (2009). Papadimitriou designed the Middlesex County Council website in 2007, and in the same year he helped provide material for Will Self’s The Book of Dave. in 2009, John Rogers made a film on Papadimitriou’s life and thought, called The London Perambulator. From 2009 to 2011, along with Rogers, Papadimitriou hosted Ventures and Adventures in Topography, a radio show on Resonance FM. Papadimitriou calls his walks and writing ‘deep topography,’ and is in turn described by his professional colleagues as a ‘deep topographer’, distinguishing his field of research and literature from ongoing trends of psychogeography. This interview was conducted on a rainy afternoon, in a small café at Golders Green, near Hampstead Heath, in London.
The Bard on the Banks of Dulung Sings: Conversation with Jaydeep Sarangi
Jaydeep Sarangi is a bilingual writer, academic, editor, interviewer, translator and author of a number of significant publications on postcolonial issues, Indian writing in English, Australian literature, marginal literatures and creative writing, in journals and magazines both in India and abroad. He is on the editorial board of several refereed journals in different continents. Widely anthologised and reviewed as a poet and a critic on marginal writings. He has authored and edited many books. I was prompted to interview him after reading his collection of poems titled "Faithfully, I Wait: Poems on rain, thunder and lightning at Jhargram and Beyond." I conducted this interview via a series of e-mails in the month of February.
Copyright (c) 2018 Ruchi Singh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Mapping Forgotten Worlds: a conversation with Danielle Clode
Danielle Clode is an Adelaide-based author who has written on prehistoric megafauna, Pacific exploration, killer whales and bushfires. She writes children’s books, essays, fiction and popular zoology, which have won awards, fellowships and prizes too numerous to mention. Her latest book, at the time of writing, is The Wasp and the Orchid, a biography of Australian nature writer Edith Coleman. Danielle and I have known each other for some years, and we are currently working together on an edited book about first contact between Australian Aboriginal people and explorers. For details of her publications and career, see her website at danielleclode.com.au A graduate in zoology from Oxford University, Danielle has worked as a zookeeper and a museum researcher. Growing up on the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, she spent some of her childhood travelling coastal Australia with her family by boat. Danielle teaches creative and academic writing and in all her work she is conscious of the importance of form and voice. In this interview I asked her about style, genre and technique in her writing, particularly The Wasp and the Orchid (2018), Voyages to the South Seas: In Search of Terres Australes (2007) and A Future in Flames (2010). We spoke at her home in the Adelaide Hills in June 2018, and I first asked her about the combination of styles in A Future in Flames, her book about the history, science and future impact of bushfires in Australia.
Copyright (c) 2018 Gillian Dooley https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Towards the cultural banner of Bangla Dalit Literary Movement: an interview with Nakul Mallik
Nakul Mallik was born in a low-wage family of the Namashudra caste living in a village, Gajendrapur. He is one of the pioneer Bangla Dalit activists/writers. His signal works include three biographies, a work of religious philosophy; several short story collections, a book of eight one-act plays and Manik Ratan, a story based on rural Bengal and the social situation at the time of Partition. Here Nakul Mallik is in conversation with Jaydeep Sarangi where he frankly narrates the growth and development of Bangla Dalit Movement. This interview took place at Tollygunj railway station, Kolkata where Jaydeep Sarangi and Nakul Mallik met for academic and organizational discussions.
“We live and love on a fissure”: an Interview with author Jerry Pinto
Jerry Pinto is one of India’s most prominent names in literature; equally appropriated and applauded by staunch critics and connoisseurs. Apart from being an author, he has worked as a journalist and as a faculty member in his native city of Mumbai. Apart from his fiction, non-fiction, poems and memoir, he has written books for children and has put together some very well-received anthologies. Jerry Pinto’s works have won him a plethora of accolades. His first novel, Em and the Big Hoom (2012) was awarded India’s highest honour from the Academy of Letters, the Sahitya Akademi, for a novel in English; the Windham-Campbell Prize supervised by the Beinecke Library, Yale, USA; the Hindu ‘Lit for Life’ Award, and the Crossword Award for fiction. Helen: the Life and Times of a Bollywood H-Bomb (2006) won the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema. His translations from Marathi of Mallika Amar Sheikh’s autobiography I Want to Destroy Myself was shortlisted for the Crossword Award for Fiction. Furthermore, his graphic novel in collaboration with Garima Gupta was shortlisted for the Crossword Award for Children’s Fiction. His translation of the Dalit writer Baburao Bagul’s When I Hid My Caste won the Fiction Prize at the Bangalore Literary Festival in 2018 and his novel Murder in Mahim (2017) won the Valley of Words Prize, and was shortlisted for the Crossword Award for Fiction and the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image Prize. But there was a time when he feared rejection. In this interview Jerry Pinto touches on various issues, revealing the story of how he became a writer, a career option which wasn’t then recognised as a very reliable job prospect in India. He also discusses his social engagements and his connection with the city of his birth, Mumbai.
Copyright (c) 2019 Maya Vinai https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sanjukta Dasgupta, Professor and Former Head, Dept of English and Ex- Dean, Faculty of Arts, Calcutta University, teaches English and American literature along with New Literatures in English. She is a poet, critic and translator, and her articles, poems, short stories and translations have been published in journals of distinction in India and abroad. Her inner sphere overlaps the outer on the speculative and the shadowy. There is a sublime inwardness in her poems. Her recent signal books include Snapshots, Dilemma, First Language, More Light, and Lakshmi Unbound. She co-authored Radical Rabindranath: Nation, Family, Gender: Post-colonial Readings of Tagore’s Fiction and Film, and she is the Managing Editor of Families: A Journal of Representations. She has received many grants and awards, including Fulbright fellowships and residencies and an Australia India Council Fellowship. Now she is the Convener, English Board, Shaitya Akademi. Professor Dasgupta has visited Nepal and Bangladesh as a member of the SAARC Writers Delegation, and has served as a co-judge and Chairperson for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region). She has visited Melbourne and Malta to serve on the pan-Commonwealth jury panel. She is now an e-member of the advisory committee of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, UK. She is Visiting Professor, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, and she is the President of the Executive Committee, Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library in Kolkata. The interview was conducted via email in December 2018.
Copyright (c) 2019 Jaydeep Sarangi, Antara Ghatak https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Daya Dissanayake (born 8 March 1947) is an award-winning bilingual Sri Lankan novelist, poet and feature writer. His work spans nine novels in English, six novels in Sinhala, a collection of poems, and numerous articles in newspapers, journals and magazines. He is the author of the first e-novel in Asia, The Saadhu Testament (1998), and the first e-novel in Sinhala, Vessan Novu Wedun (2003). He is the only Sri Lankan writer to receive the Sri Lankan State Literary Award for the best English novel thrice and was awarded the SAARC Literary Award in 2013. Being the first Sri Lankan to release his work online and for free access, he is often seen as one of Sri Lanka's earliest and most vocal advocates for the e-book format, copy left and Creative Commons. This interview was conducted at Yercaud, a hill station in Salem District, in Tamil Nadu, India. Some answers were formed during the e mail exchanges.
Copyright (c) 2019 Jaydeep Sarangi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A Conversation with Yasmine Gooneratne (1994)
Gillian Dooley writes: Yasmine Gooneratne, literary scholar, novelist and poet, was born in Sri Lanka, educated there and at Cambridge, and moved to Sydney in 1972. She taught at Macquarie University for many years and has published more than 20 books and many essays and articles. Sri Lanka has always been a part of Gooneratne’s literary world. As a scholar she has done extensive and impressive research on the cultural and literary history of Ceylon, and her three novels all approach Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans in different ways. Her most Australian novel is her first, A Change of Skies, published by Pan Macmillan Australia in 1991, which concerns the migration of a Sri Lankan academic and his wife to Sydney. In November 2018 I was lucky enough to be among a group of Australian scholars who visited the historic Viharagala Estate Bungalow in Haputale, in the beautiful south-facing central highlands of Sri Lanka. The bungalow was built in 1876 and is now owned by the Gooneratne family. We held a mini-conference there, and were delighted that Yasmine Gooneratne was present for the occasion and throughout our visit. I had decided I would give a paper on Yasmine’s work and its links with both Australia and with Jane Austen, and in the course of my research I came across this fascinating interview with Dr R.P. Rama of Rajasthan University, Jaipur, published in SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies in 1994 (Volume 38, no. 1). The interview was conducted in Sydney in 1994 and discusses the genesis A Change of Skies in some detail, along with a discussion of the state of postcolonial studies in Australian universities in the 1990s. Dr Rama has kindly given permission for us to reprint the interview. R.P. Rama writes: Shortly before my first visit to Australia I had read Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies during a stay at Mussorie in June 1992. The present interaction recorded here, however, took place in Sydney. It was a beautiful winter morning and Yasmine Gooneratne generously shared her reflections with me.
Copyright (c) 2019 R.P. Rama, Gillian Dooley https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reinventing Lives: A Conversation with Steven Carroll
Steven Carroll is the author of twelve novels, including two series; one based around his family background in Glenroy in suburban Melbourne, and the other inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I have admired Steven’s work ever since I reviewed The Time We Have Taken, his 2007 Miles Franklin Award winning novel, for the very first issue of Transnational Literature. This was the third of the ‘Glenroy’ novels – there are now six in that series, the latest being The Year of the Beast (2019), based on the experiences of his grandmother in Melbourne in 1917. Recently, when catching up on some long-overdue reading, I picked up A World of Other People (2013), the second of the Eliot novels, to discover that, although it is never made explicit in the book, the heroine is a reinvented version of another of my favourite writers, Iris Murdoch. I immediately decided it was time to travel to Melbourne (on the Overland train, which Steven’s father used to drive) to interview him. We met in late January 2019 in bustling Lygon Street, Carlton, where it was too noisy to record our conversation. We found a quiet, shady table nearby on the Melbourne University campus and talked for an hour, till the heat drove us back to Lygon Street to continue chatting over a cup of tea.
Copyright (c) 2019 Gillian Dooley https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Basudev Sunani (born in 1962 in the remote village of Maniguda, in the district of Nuapada, Odisha,) is an Oriya poet. He is the author of four collections of poetry and a recent book entitled Dalit, Capitalism and Globalisation. He represents a strong, articulate and engaged Dalit presence in the world of Oriya verse.