C.J. Griffin and Amrita Shenoy

Working across the page, stage, and airwaves, Jackie Kay is one of the most accomplished writers in Britain today. In this interview, held on 13 September 2023, C.J. Griffin (CG) and Amrita Shenoy (AS) ask questions ranging across the different literary forms and themes that have animated Kay’s oeuvre over the last thirty years. In response, Kay reflects on the craft of writing and her career as it has unfolded alongside rapid technological, social, and political change in Britain and beyond.

CG: During a short film you made with the Scottish Book Trust, you said that you ‘write in order to ask questions, not to answer them’. What are the questions you are asking when you write? Have they changed over time?

Jackie Kay: Every book brings its own set of dilemmas and questions, really. In Trumpet, I was interested in the basis of identity — particularly gender identity and how the act of love could transcend concerns or worries about identity. In other words, if you love somebody enough, you believe them. In May Day,I was interested in protest. Protest from throughout my life and in grief, including whether grief is a form of protest.

In The Adoption Papers, I was drawn to ideas of nature and nurture and which of them is stronger in asserting people’s personalities and identities. I suppose the loose theme of a lot of my books is identity and the voice — how the voice works and whether the voice is character and can be plot.  

Seamus Heaney once said that every writer has their own plot, their own wee patch of ground they keep digging. It doesn’t matter if the patch of ground is quite small as long as, each time, you find something surprising. My little patches are identity, voice and character and I keep trying to explore these themes from different angles.

CG: In art and life there is a sense of there being a ‘real’ truth and, equally, a ‘fictional truth’ – something you yourself have acknowledged. What does ‘fictional truth’ mean for you? Do you think its distinction from ‘real’ truth is becoming harder to maintain?

JK: Well, I think there are two kinds of fictional truth that currently operate in our world. There’s one I call a pure version of the fictional truth where your imagination gets to something closer to the truth than ‘the truth’. When I, say, created my character Mohammad Nassar Sharif, the registrar in Trumpet, I didn’t interview lots of registrars for the research. He was loosely based on a fleeting moment from when I was registering the birth of my son. Everything else about him was fictitious. Yet, he seemed closer to the truth than if I had to try to recreate somebody from reality.

Whereas Sophie Stones in Trumpet is a character we see often in our society. We have craven, wanton, corrupt, lawless journalists who make things up for their living and distress people. Because she was too close to that truth, I couldn’t breathe imaginative truth into her. And so, she’s the least successful character in the book. For a fictional character to work, it is necessary that something else breathes in them.

There’s another kind of fictional truth that exists in our society.  We live in times where reality is challenged and threatened all the time, and where people fictionalise themselves through different social media outlets as the line dividing their real life and their imaginative life is very, very thin indeed. Nobody can tell who the real person is anymore. So, we have a big challenge now, with the question of the truth of a self. And it has a different answer than I would have given ten or fifteen years ago.

AS: Some of your works, such as The Adoption Papers (1991) and Life Mask (2005), have often invited autobiographical readings. However, in terms of literary appreciation, might this limit a text’s autonomy to the scope of the author’s life? How separate can the art be from the artist?

JK:  When I first wrote The Adoption Papers, I didn’t expect it to be paid the attention it got. Neither did the publisher. 

I think people saw it as a personal story. I appreciate the idea that I write from my own experience but my own experience intersects with those of other people’s. My hope is that a reader will read my works and identify with them however they like. In fact, people do often identify with my writing, and write to me to share how they’ve engaged with my writing.

I think people saw it as a personal story. I appreciate the idea that I write from my own experience but my own experience intersects with those of other people’s. My hope is that a reader will read my works and identify with them however they like. In fact, people do often identify with my writing, and write to me to share how they’ve engaged with my writing.

As to the question of whether it limits a work to just read it autobiographically, I think it does, yes. If we read Sylvia Plath’s poems, for instance — not that I’m comparing myself to her, I’m just talking about a writer who gets read very autobiographically — then sometimes, we can put onto the work itself, things that we know from the life [of the author]. And we don’t then give the writer the freedom or the license to be completely imaginative. An awful lot of writers through time have been hampered by this very dilemma. For Anne Sexton, she was affected by how often her work was read as a cipher for her personal experiences. I think I managed to swerve this problem of seeing myself as representative — since, I don’t even really see that my work, once I’ve written it, is completely me anymore.

AS: Writers of colour in Britain have often discussed a literary ‘ghettoisation’ in the global literary scene, a typecasting of marginalised writers as political voices. In your view, what could readers and scholars of literature do differently to circumvent this problem?

JK: One thing they could do is regard the text itself and not make assumptions or necessarily connect one writer to the other. There are writers that exist in the same space and time, like the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s exciting when you read their works together. Yet, connections between writers’ works happen almost by a process of osmosis or modes we can’t easily, sociologically, explain. But since black writers have been marginalised for so long, literary critics have now got [to find] a way of looking at their works. Sometimes they then lump such writers together and perpetuate a ‘ghettoisation’. I tend to elude such groups because I am a Scottish black writer who writes in a voice different from that of the stereotype for the black writer. Yet, it’s equally problematic if there’s no way of grouping and identifying people because this will also lead to their invisibility.

I would put black writers in parts of the bookshops or in groups where they could easily be found. But I would also advise on doubling up and having them everywhere in the rest of the shop.

CG: Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds is a digital archive of Black and Asian British contemporary writing. How have Britain and Britishness figured in your own writing about Scotland and Scottishness?

JK: Seemingly, Scotland sees itself as a victim of an English colonialism — which it has been, definitely. But it is also true that Scotland’s own benefits from the British Empire haven’t been discussed enough. In The Lamplighter, I wrote about how British cities profited from money from the slave trade. One of the cities that the book covers in detail is Glasgow — a city that would hardly have invited attention for its connections with the slave trade. People knew about the tobacco lords but they didn’t read more into names such as ‘Virginia Street’ or ‘Jamaica Bridge’. Similarly, in the popular imagination, a plantation owner is never wearing a kilt. We need to grow up as a country. It’s taken Britain, generally anyway, an awfully long time to acknowledge racism in its institutions. There are examples of institutionalised racism even in leftfield things.

AS: Interestingly, ‘Makar’ translates to ’maker’. In this sense, the poet laureate and, by extension, the writer, is a maker of fictive worlds. In your time as Makar, which fictive worlds did you feel most compelled to make and share?

JK:  I like how democratic the term ‘Makar’ is. It comes from the old word ’to make things’, used in the fifteenth century to describe bards. This was not exclusively Scottish, at first. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer, too, was referred to as a Makar. It’s the opposite of the word ‘laureate’, which implies monarchs, kings, queens and laurels. Rather, Makar suggests that poetry can be practical — essential as well as elegiac. For example, when I read about the ‘Baby Box of Essential Things’ project, I wrote to the Scottish Government to ask if a poem could be included as an essential thing. To my surprise, they said ‘yes’. That’s something that is important to me; that poetry can have its uses.

I also read the poem ‘Threshold’ for the opening of the Scottish Parliament. I wanted it to be a multi-voiced poem in many different languages to show Scotland as a place of welcome. Because, in that year, 2016, Scotland had voted very differently on Brexit than England and Wales, with 62% of the Scottish population wanting to stay in Europe. So being Scots Makar was a thrilling job to have and, also, to be able to go around Scotland, to the tiny Hebridean islands and see how those places have changed. For instance, I was in North Uist, near Hebrides, and I was surprised that there was a huge lesbian turnout for me.  It gave me a sense of how the country was changing; from rural Scotland, down to round all the islands and the mainland, and urban Scotland. And it was great to try and reflect that in my writing.

AS:  The ‘many-voicedness’ you discuss can be seen across your works. As you mentioned, a recent example of this is ’Threshold’ which invites Scotland’s diverse ethno-linguistic identities to unite in the same ‘living room’. What is it about multiplicity that you think enables such powerful expression?

JK: The refrain of ‘Threshold’ is ’it takes many tongues to tell a story’. I believe that. The world — particularly the Western world — is very ethnocentric. It promotes certain global languages, overlooking other languages that people speak. People cannot be excluded on such bases and locked out of experiences. Particularly in Scotland, there are more languages spoken than people automatically think of. For instance, Italian Scots and Chinese Scots have been there for years. I then wanted to have as many languages as were actually spoken in Scotland to make the poem multiple. Because, we are obsessed with singular truths in our society, but I believe the truth is multiple. And the closer we get to multiple voices telling their stories, the better society will be.

CG: Across many different genres and forms, your writing often returns to secrets and secrecy. And this interest in secrets is frequently connected with music. The most obvious examples are Trumpet (1998) and Bessie Smith (1997). What interests you as a writer about secrecy? Are secrecy and music connected?

JK: I am fascinated by secrets. We are all are fascinated by secrets, as human beings. It’s interesting to ask which things people will easily talk about and which they’ll be silent about.

Sometimes, silence is as creative or as palpable as noise. I am interested in secrets because, like music, they’re all to do with time. So, I guess secrets and music connect through time. Secrets are time bombs waiting to go off. Why we are perhaps thrilled by them, sometimes in a salacious way, is because we know that sooner or later, the secret will come out. Even if it is after somebody has died, the secret, eventually, does come out. It’s very rare for a secret to even last a lifetime and for anyone to get away with it, completely. So, there’s a kind of discovery in that, which is fascinating.

There’s something very fictive about secrets. That’s why we have so many expressions around secrecy, like ‘the truth is stranger than fiction’. The truth usually involves secrets and in being ‘stranger’ than fiction, the truth is usually a secret truth…

AS: You once movingly said that a poem is a “little moment of belief”. Often however, writers find it difficult to make their moments of belief last, what with rejections from big-ticket publishers and literary prizes that construct notions of the ‘best’ writer. Having navigated the writing industry for more than three decades, which insights are worth sharing with emerging writers?

JK: The advice differs depending on the writing people produce. My advice for young poets would be to read their poetry out loud, to themselves or to friends. To send their poetry to magazines, from Poetry Review to Magma. To enter young poets’ competitions like Foyle Young Poets of the Year. To try and get on Arvon Creating Writing courses and to enter the Poetry Business Award, which publishes a pamphlet of poems first, since it’s difficult to get a collection of poems published without having published first of all. And the pamphlet is enjoying a new renaissance. It’s wonderful how many outlets there are for beautifully, artistically well-produced pamphlets, from Full Candlestick to Lighthouse, and others. There’s even an award for the best pamphlet — the Michael Marks Poetry Award.

If it was a young novelist, I would tell them to join a writers’ group or form one of their own. Because it’s useful to have feedback. The novel is a long and lonely trudge. The little moment of belief with regard to the poem is easy enough to sustain for the length of a poem but much more difficult to sustain for the length of a novel. And writers are Jekyll and Hyde creatures, in a way, because we have to believe in ourselves but we also have to doubt ourselves in equal measure.

So, it’s important to tell young writers to believe in themselves but also to have enough healthy self-criticism; to be able to kill off your darlings, as they say. And to know that editing is, really, the secret of the universe — it’s not so much what you write first of all, it’s how you rewrite and rewrite and rewrite again. And not to be afraid of failure and of bad reviews. To be completely and utterly yourself. To take risks, because writing is a risk-taking business. And sometimes that can feel quite scary. Writing is as psychological a game as football. You know you can get a penalty when nobody’s looking and, then, when everyone’s looking, you suddenly can’t get a penalty!

Every time you get to write a new poem, you must discover something fresh and the challenge of that is terrifying! So, after three decades, I know that there are terrors, but I also know that there are things that we can do about them.

Cite this: Griffin, & Shenoy, Amrita. “On Being a Writer: An Interview with Jackie Kay (2024).” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/on-being-a-writer-interview-jackie-kay. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Clara Park

On 23 May 2024, the poet, writer and performer Roger Robinson gave a reading and talk at Oxford University’s St Hilda’s College entitled, “As if their bodies became AIR.” Following this, Clara Park held the following interview with the poet.

Clara Park (CP): You told us a lot about the repetition of the butterfly motif in your work. Could you speak more to specific ideas or objects that recur across and throughout your work and how you return (or do not return) to certain themes?

Roger Robinson (RR): Animals have entered my work in the strangest way, never planned it, but as I’m looking over my new and selected poems at the moment, I clearly take animals to be proxies of myself. I make them either angry, scared, or say weird things, or make them sympathetic. Somebody pointed it out to me, I didn’t know it myself, but there’s references to crazy crows, dogs, butterflies, horses, but I clearly have something with the animal kingdom. It wasn’t planned, but I dig it. 

CP: We got to speak a little at the end about your influences and inspirations. What are you reading now, and who were the greatest influences (literary or otherwise) that brought you into writing?

RR: Right now, I’m reading Rilke, selected poems of Rilke, translated, and Helen Vendler, a series of essays called The Given and the Made, that speaks in really interesting ways about lyric poetry. People who brought me into poetry… I would say between a writer called Kwame Dawes, who ended up being a mentor of mine, and a writer called Sharon Olds. They definitely had that voice, and saw the way I think in that voice, and it led me to get my voice. And that voice was very much simple but not simplistic, heavy on emotions and narrative and heavy on craft. 

CP: Have you been able to find home in your writing? Or have you arrived at the way to create a portable paradise?

RR: When you say find home, I’m not sure if you meant find “tribe I belong” to or feel comfortable in when writing, but I most definitely mean both. Writing people are definitely my tribe and my home. Writing was something I always had as a gift, and it’s something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life. And, on the subject of writing paradise: it was not so much a case of if I could write paradise in a new place, it’s more if I could make this new place into a paradise that I had once known. I needed to do it because I was putting down roots here and I was having a child, so I had to come to some conclusions about where I really live, and stop having the immigrant mind of living in two places but never belonging to either. And so it’s a conscious decision. And, to some extent, with A Portable Paradise, the original idea was to document how I could do it, or the process of doing it. 

CP: When your work is politicized, do you come to view what you’ve written in a new way? What is it like to see things that may have originally been written deeply personally and then reanimated in the public sphere in perhaps unexpected ways? Are there any instances that have particularly stuck with you?

RR: I think the personal is political, and everything is political, but there were a few poems that did surprise me when taken to the public sphere. Like there’s a poem I have called “Nurses,” [written when] I did not know that COVID would happen and everyone would be dependent on nurses. And nurses had a particular role to play in society at that point, and that particular poem became quite a chant for them. Along with a poem I wrote about my son being tended to by nurses. Also a lot of people quoted that poem when they were trying to raise the pay for nurses, cause they had worked so hard over COVID. It wasn’t surprising, I understand it, but I didn’t expect it.  

Cite this: Park, Clara. “Clara Park interviews Roger Robinson.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/clara-park-interviews-roger-robinson/. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Sadia Zulfiqar

In this interview with Sadia Zulfiqar, Leila Aboulela reflects on her creative process and her approach to representing Muslim women in her fiction.

Cite this: Zulfiqar, Sadia and Leila Aboulela. “Interview with Leila Aboulela.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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C. S. Bhagya

In this e-mail interview with C. S. Bhagya, Monica Ali gets candid about the language games in her work, the women who populate her narratives, and what compels her to return to writing novels.

You have written across genres, including novels, short stories, and essays, but have returned to the novel quite frequently. What about the form of the novel has allowed you to write the stories you have wanted to tell?

When I was growing up, novels were an escape (from a tense household, from loneliness); they were my only means of travel; they schooled me in ways that school couldn’t. People talk of ‘losing yourself’ in a novel. As an adolescent reader that’s exactly what I was often longing – and able – to do. The more I disappeared, the better. This ability mostly eludes me now, as a reader. The ‘I’ is stubbornly present, asking: How does this work? Why does this not work? As a writer, I think part of the reason I’ll always return to the novel is simply that it allows me to banish the ‘I’ for long stretches when I’m working. By no means all of the time, of course. Constructing a novel also requires the analytical part of the brain to work, and work hard. I enjoy that too. The challenge of it, the intellectual jigsaw. I like the research phase – not least because it’s a hell of a lot easier than the writing. Also, the novel offers the greatest opportunity to go under the skin of others, explore their psychological terrain, their worldview, walk in their footsteps. In other words, create characters.

I recently taught Brick Lane to an undergraduate student and we spent a lot of time unpacking Nazneen’s motivations and the transformation of her life in Britain. We were particularly intrigued by the different registers of English at play in the novel, especially in the letters exchanged between Nazneen and her sister, Hasina, whose acquaintance with the language seems distant at best. We wondered if the correspondence was actually taking place in Bangla, given the difference and remove from ‘standard’ English in their (particularly Hasina’s) letters? 

Yes, you’re right, the correspondence was actually taking place in Bangla. It couldn’t be otherwise, given that we know that Nazneen doesn’t know much English, and have no reason to suppose that Hasina would know more than a word or two. So, the question is: why broken English? It’s not about the logic of translating Bangla to English. Although there is an element of that: Hasina has only a basic education and wouldn’t write at all fluently. But the rendering goes beyond the logic. I was seeking to create her character through the letters, which is the only way in which, as readers, we experience her directly. I wanted to convey some of the naivety, the chaos, the brokenness of her life.

Following from the previous question, how do you negotiate with your characters’ multi-lingual landscapes and lives when you are fitting them into a novel written in English? What kind of linguistic, artistic, and creative translations would you say take place when writing such characters? 

See above! It’s a tricky business. I think if you get trapped in the logic you will please the pedants but quite possibly at the cost of getting closer to the characters. It’s a lesson I took early in my reading life from A House for Mr Biswas – Naipaul renders conversations that would most likely have taken place in Hindi in a kind of Indian-inflected English. But I don’t have all the answers, I’m still groping around to work these things out. You have to feel your way towards the tone, the register, the cadence, the rhythms of each of your character’s speech, no matter what their mother-tongue is, and in the end those considerations – how I hear their voices, which spring from their way of being in the world – are what guide me. Whether that’s the right or wrong approach, I don’t know.

Brick Lane introduces many important concerns, such as the limits of cosmopolitanism in Britain, Islamophobia, and anti-immigration sentiments, among others, all of which continue to be relevant today, perhaps even more so than before because of Brexit. Despite these difficult, dark themes, Brick Lane still ends on a note of optimism as Nazneen reclaims her autonomy in a Britain which appears to promise many opportunities for a woman like her. What kind of stories would you anticipate for a post-Brexit Britain? What would a post-Brexit Brick Lane look like? 

I’ve recently become the Patron of Hopscotch Asian Women’s Centre, a charity which helps women and girls with issues ranging from domestic violence to training in jobs skills. Most of their clients are of Bangladeshi origin or heritage. And if I were writing Brick Lane today and researching it as I did twenty years ago, I’d find many if not all of the same things that were happening back then. For example, staff have told me about how they help some of the clients with practicalities such as handling cash, how to catch a bus, how to order a cup of tea in a café. The challenges come in the form of not speaking English, of being controlled by husbands or other male relatives, of not having ventured out of the community. One difference I’ve picked up so far is the problem of older wives being divorced or abandoned when their husbands, having built up some financial resources after many years of hard work, decide to take a new young bride from the village. I’m sure there would be some other changes if I delved deeper, but I’m not sure they would substantially change a Brick Lane researched and written today.

That’s not to say there aren’t other stories to be written! For example, today I would write Shahana’s story. Or Bibi’s. Where might they be? What might they be doing? I think the answers would be: anywhere and anything.

Princess Diana’s story has been catapulted back into the media limelight because of the latest season of The Crown, prompting questions on privacy, authenticity, and the unreasonable expectations placed on women in the royal family. Could you say something about what prompted you to tell her “untold” story in your last novel? 

A couple of years ago, I was interviewed onstage at British Council literature event. The interviewer expressed surprise that I’d chosen to write about an imaginary English princess. After all, my first book, Brick Lane, was about a Bangladeshi housewife who didn’t even speak English. Would the real (the authentic) Monica Ali please step forward? I said that I understood his surprise. Nazneen, the protagonist of Brick Lane is a virgin bride, she is uneducated, unworldly, has an arranged marriage to a much older man, suffers the scrutiny of the wider community, has an affair but decides that a man is not the way to salvation, and reinvents a new life for herself. The protagonist of Untold Story, on the other hand is a virgin bride, who is uneducated, unworldly, has an arranged marriage to a much older man, suffers the scrutiny of the outside world, has an affair but decides that a man is not the way to salvation, and reinvents herself and her life. No similarities there at all!

That got a laugh from the audience. As I’d hoped it would. There’s an element of my answer that’s a bit tongue-in-cheek. And an element that isn’t. Of course, the protagonists of Brick Lane and Untold Story are also, in some ways, wildly different. But the fundamental motivation for me in writing about Nazneen and Lydia is pretty much the same. Nazneen might easily be dismissed by a casual observer – a brown woman in a sari – and not granted the unique and complex interior life that we all have. That’s the same dehumanizing view that it’s all too easy to apply to celebrities. Diana (who, as you note, was my inspiration for Lydia) was labelled in so many ways. But each individual is more than the sum of her signifiers.

Do you think the publishing industry and the international prize circuits are doing enough to spotlight the work of writers of colour in the UK? What more needs to be done/ could be done?

The publishing industry has been slow to change. But I think efforts are being made, and in the wake of BLM this year, perhaps those efforts will be accelerated. We need more diversity in editorial departments, marketing and sales departments, in literary agencies, and so on. Until that happens, the risk is that changes will be somewhat on the surface.

Could you tell us a little about what you are working on at the moment? 

I finished a novel towards the end of last year. It’s called Love Marriage, and it will be published (so I’m told) in Spring 2022. It’s set in 2016/17, in London, and it’s about two very different families, the Ghoramis and the Sangsters, who are thrown together after a whirlwind engagement. I’m working on the edits for that at the moment. I’m also writing the initial episode of an original television drama. The script has been commissioned by the BBC, but as I’ve learned over the years, most projects fall by the wayside so the likelihood is that this one will too. It’s about the giving and taking of offence. That’s about all I can say about it at this stage!

Has your relationship with writing changed during the pandemic? How has it impacted your thinking about writing stories, your relationship with your craft, and your beliefs about the importance of telling stories? 

No, I don’t think so. I feel grateful that I’m able to continue working when so many others can’t, or have lost their jobs. So far, I have felt zero desire to write anything pandemic-related. But I guess that could change, who knows.

Cite this: Bhagya, C. S. “In Monica Ali’s Worlds.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Daniele Nunziata

In this interview, Raymond Antrobus speaks about the relationship between literature and education, as well as the impact of family, mental health, immigration, and spirituality on his verse. He is in conversation with Daniele Nunziata, a lecturer in literature in English at the University of Oxford. The British poet explores his stance on literary awards and criticism following the release of his first book, The Perseverance. He also discusses the impact of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic on his writing process and the increasing accessibility of poetry spaces (and online resources) for both deaf poets and audience members. The interview was held online on 20 August 2020. The recording below gives a few audio samples from the interview which appears in full in the transcription.

A very warm welcome to Writers Make Worlds, Raymond. Following the acclaim you’ve received for The Perseverance (including the many prizes it has won, such as the Ted Hughes Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize), how does it feel achieving that kind of reception and has it altered the way you understand your relationship with readers and audiences?

First of all, awards are incredibly validating. They give you a new kind of visibility that does feel powerful in a way that not only validates the work that you’ve done but encourages you to carry on and create more. So much has happened since the awards in terms of going back to the blank page. It can be daunting if I let too much of that noise in. I’m writing the next book and I just know it’s a different kind of book with a different kind of perspective and I have to not expect everything I do [in the future] to get that kind of attention. In a way, I was really lucky that this success didn’t happen to me over night. I had been trying to write this book [The Perseverance] for about ten years; I’ve been writing other things and performing; I was doing Slam and was involved in competitive poetry, internationally as well as nationally. I had a lot of experience already with success and failure outside of the literary world, so I am grateful for the perspective I gained elsewhere before achieving the awards for The Perseverance.

I really think that, for us writers, it can’t be about the awards. It really can’t; we can’t be thinking about that while we’re writing. This [advice] is for myself, and I try to say this to others who ask me about it. We need to write what we need to write. I honestly, hand on my heart, had absolutely no idea, and no expectation, for this book to win anything or get picked up by anyone. I was genuinely just writing the book I felt I needed to write. That was such a grounding and healthy thing for me. So, it’s interesting seeing how, with the visibility you get, a kind of critique emerges. I welcome critique, I think critique is really important – but there’s a layer of critique that’s not about the work, it’s about this kind of assumed idea that is projected, not through the writing or the writer or the poet, but through the headlines or the media. So, when I read something like ‘the new voice of a generation’ or ‘one of the most important voices right now’, I think: I’ve never said that about myself or my own work! I think what that can do is create a toxic dynamic with peers and other poets and other writers, and that might make them feel envious and sometimes even discouraged, rather than inspired.

I want to inspire people with my work. I am having to accept that there’s only so much control I have. All I can do really is just write the next poem; I’m just trying to write the next poem. I’m trying to make the poem as good as it can be to me, and I’m trying to make sure my work keeps its integrity. Integrity is really important.

Would it be fair to say that pursuing awards can be a distraction from writing in an authentic way?

Oh, completely! Unfortunately, there does seem to be a formula for an award-winning book and once you have a formula for something like that, it’s tough escaping from it. For myself, I wasn’t thinking of that when writing The Perseverance. It’s only now, and speaking with peers, and they say, ‘you know, here is what an award-winning book is’ and I hear that and think: right, but is there any truth to it?

In terms of poetry, it’s just about having an idea and trying to examine and pursue that idea through a poem. For me, that’s where it has to start and end. Because writing poetry in my experience began as a very private thing. Then, it became a very public thing, and I managed for quite a long time to feel like I had a space for me. I felt encouraged by the public – doing readings and having people that were coming to readings and listening and resonating, or going into classrooms and universities. That was helpful and inspiring. I just want to keep being able to do that.

I think awards can bring about a whole new expectation. For years, when I would go into a classroom or an event at a literature festival, the majority of people hadn’t heard my work. They may have read it, but they hadn’t seen me read. Now, there’s a different kind of expectation. Getting myself back into that space where I’m trying to honour who I am and where I am at a moment – and accepting that it’s ok if things change, if my style changes, if my voice changes, if the way I read or listen changes. It’s not better or worse, it’s just different.

It’s interesting hearing about how you connect with other people, as a poet. How important is collaboration in creating a body of work, even though a book like The Perseverance is ultimately your words alone on the page?

That pursuit for isolation is particularly interesting in times of lockdown. Nonetheless, while you and Rilke have had contrasting ways of becoming poets, you both come back to verse. Why? Why have you chosen to continue composing poetry, rather than any other form of literature or mode of expression? You’ve spoken on the influence of your family – preaching has a poetic quality to it – and poetry has a focus on the voice and on sound which is greater than in other literary modes, like the novel. What specifically is it about poetry that attracts you?

So many things. Like a lot of young people, I would journal and write a diary from as far back as I can remember. I always wrote stuff down, like stories or journal entries, in the same book. It was someone else finding and reading my work one day, after I left it around, and them saying ‘Oh, you write poetry’ and me asking, ‘Oh, really?’, and them telling me ‘This is poetry’. I thought, wow! It took someone else to tell me I was writing poetry, whereas I thought I was just writing. It was just a kind of expression, something I did in private. The fact that that was one of the purest memories I have of self-expression encouraged me to pursue it. The person who told me ‘oh, this is poetry’ was surprised. That always got me: how I was able to surprise people with poetry.

Even in school, I would write poems in the back of my English book. My predicted grade for the GCSEs wasn’t very high, but when we had a poetry assignment, the teacher was often positively surprised by what I was writing. One teacher accused me of plagiarism for it and asked, ‘Are you sure this is you?’ I think writing poetry was a natural thing for me.

Earlier on, you were discussing the different ways to become a poet, and you moved onto talk about your experiences as a GCSE student, and the offensive accusation of plagiarism levied against you.

Right now, in summer 2020, the government has announced that schools are to be given the option to drop poetry from GCSE English exams next year. What is your response to this decision and its implications for how poetry is integrated into curriculums? You became a poet by balancing the tensions between what your teachers suggested poetry ought to be with how you, and your family, understood poetry. As an educator now, do you have advice on how poetry should be taught in schools?

The decision to drop poetry in 2021 is a complicated one. I’ve heard both sides of the argument. I have listened to a teacher talk about why it’s a good thing, and why [teaching poetry for exams] is putting so much pressure on him and his students. I’ve heard people say it’s still possible to advocate the importance of poetry without forcing students to take a test in it, and how it’s the tests themselves that are doing harm to the reputation of poetry.

Even though I studied it for GCSE, and it was one of the few things I did well in, I had an advantage because I had people around me who were passionate about poetry and it can be difficult to teach something you’re not passionate about or that you are intimidated by. I was also lucky that when I was teaching in a few schools in Hackney and Walthamstow, the English departments that I came across were very passionate about teaching poetry. They would also have space for poets to come into classrooms, and not just into English lessons – poets would go into Science, and Maths, and History, and they would create a poem that incorporated the subject and then it would instigate a discussion. They would bring poets into debate club and would say that they were going to make a poetic argument. Poetry is a tool; it’s not just a single thing.

Going back to the response to poetry being taken off the curriculum, I didn’t want to have a knee-jerk reaction to it, I wanted to listen first. My first reaction was actually panic. It seemed like it was done because poetry is so undervalued and misunderstood; it seemed like a really easy thing for the government to do. Those are my feelings about poetry.

This interdisciplinary approach sounds like vital work. Of these multiple ways of understanding the world, then, it’s interesting to learn that you’re the grandson of preachers, that your father considered Bob Marley a ‘prophet’, and to think about the influence of poets like Rumi and Hafez for whom representations of God were central to their works. Do you think that there is a spiritual quality (however defined) to the writing of poetry?

I’m open to it; it’s there; but I don’t know… I’m interested. I’m someone who understands the importance of curiosity when it comes to intellect and our emotional lives. Learning and understanding more about things like emotional literacy and emotional learning gave me a different angle to think about our lives and our lived experiences – how we understand them and, then, how to manage them. As writers and creative thinkers, we should look at our emotional lives with some distance as well. The entity of ‘God’ or of ‘science’ – some entity that is outside of us, slightly removed from us – offers a different perspective. That’s what it is. I am not in allegiance with a single church or ideology or idea, but I am curious about them. I will give them my time.

I think, in so many ways, curiosity can be a saving grace. There are so many statistics right now, particularly under lockdown, that talk about how mental health issues are on the rise. Before lockdown, there was a statistic that said that one in three deaf people suffer from severe depression and isolation. I remember that and, when I think about times when I go through depression and negative thinking, I feel that it’s because of perspective – it’s a very circular thing. If we have a vessel, a way into these other entities which provide other perspectives, that’s not a small thing. That can save lives. I lean on that. I lean on curiosity. I lean on openness. I try to practise compassion. So many of the things that I bring to my poetry are the things I try to bring to my lived life.

Your ideas about perspective, and the need to balance being inside your head with a sense of distance, is fascinating, especially in terms of the writing process and taking something internal outwards. Speaking about this relationship between proximity and distance – and given that you mention the complications caused by the pandemic – have these past months of lockdown transformed your relationship with poetry? Are these new demands changing the way you think or write?

Recently, I have not been writing. For the first couple months, I was trying to write every day. But my situation is that my wife is in the US. We’ve been separated and I haven’t seen her since February because she’s not allowed to leave. I’m not allowed to go there. We were half-way through an immigration process; all immigration offices stopped and everything has been on pause. This has been the most stressful and difficult year of my life. And I think that’s true of many, many people.

Of the communities with whom you are involved, one that you’ve just mentioned is the deaf community. How accessible have you found poetic spaces (in public and online) to be for deaf poets and deaf audience members? How should poetry spaces increase their accessibility in the future?

It’s only been with the success of The Perseverance that I started getting regular BSL interpreters at my readings. I did a couple readings at the Southbank Centre which were all captioned. I have done residencies at deaf schools, and I have been invited into deaf schools. I had one deaf school in Hertfordshire rename its building after me. It used to be called Beethoven House and now it’s called Antrob House. ‘Antrob’ being because, when I was younger, I thought that was my name, because I couldn’t hear the –bus, so I would say that. I thought, if it’s going to be a deaf school, I want that to stand up there: my deaf understanding of myself.

I do think there are some real positive things happening now. Even online, I’ve noticed on Google Hangouts, there’s automated closed captioning, which I’ve been using sometimes. I do think Instagram Live can do more in terms of captioning, because it’s quite a lot of work to have to caption your own videos. I have been trying to outsource that. That was one of the things for ‘Poems for a Lockdown’; I couldn’t find someone who could do that every week, it’s quite a big job. Each episode was about 45 minutes long, so it was 45 minutes of just captioning. There are some Zoom and Facebook Live events that I’ve seen, run by deaf people for deaf people, and they’re welcoming other people as well. Since being in lockdown, my sign language has become very rusty, I haven’t really been using it. That’s worried me. I feel like I need to brush-up on that. There are opportunities too, but I’m so exhausted. It takes a lot of energy to maintain health: mental health, physical health, everything. Even though you’re not going anywhere, it still feels hard. I think it’s a different time. We’re all learning as we go. I hope we can all keep being gentle with ourselves as we transition into a new time.

Cite this: Nunziata, Daniele. “Reflections on Richard Antrobus’s ‘I Want the Confidence of.’” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Ann Ang

In this interview with Ann Ang, a DPhil candidate in English at the University of Oxford, Rana Dasgupta speaks about his trajectory as a writer, his views on India’s rise in the global economy and the impact this has had on the country itself. He also discusses the changing nature of Indian literature and the place of literary writing in an age where cultural identities are both fluid and fraught. The interview was held on 22 November 2019 in Oxford.

How do you see your trajectory as a writer, working between genres and across borders?

With each new book, I wanted to do something I had never done before. My concerns have become more precise over time. The questions I’m trying to address, especially in Capital and the book I’m writing now, After Nations, are related to the distribution of global resources, and to justice. Who benefits, and loses in the global system, and who are the adjudicators?

This central question has always been present in my work, beginning with Tokyo Cancelled, where outsiders and lost people were the main characters. To a great extent, the book is about the uncanny experiences of globalisation. Solo focuses those concerns onto history, and attempts to address what it means to find oneself suddenly in a nation-state after living in an empire.

Capital, by contrast, was an attempt to take stock of changes to the landscape and interior spaces of the city I live in. Though this too was a thoroughly novelistic project – it was all about character and prose – I felt that the reality of the new Asian megalopolis was too strange for me to invent.  It was not yet codified in literature, and I needed to go out and find my “plot” by talking to real people.

The preoccupation with capital may seem to be a symptom of our current moment but has been a central concern of the novel since its inception – think of Balzac, Thackeray or Thomas Mann. As a literary work, Capital aspires to the scale of nineteenth-century novels: it tries to map capitalist modernity by looking at the networks and energies formed by the movement of money in today’s Delhi. The book has a stronger relation to Saul Bellow than to Salman Rushdie. It’s part of tracing that outward wave and expansion of capitalist centres, from Europe in the nineteenth century, to the countries experiencing their first decades of economic liberalisation today.

My current book, After Nations, is an extended essay that expands on these concerns, and is currently at about a thousand pages. As a whole, the book examines the theological and financial foundations of the nation-state in order to understand the many forms of political and related crises today. After this, I’m planning to write another novel.

It has been five years since Capital was published in 2014. How would you describe its reception as a work of literary journalism since then?

It’s the most read of my books and, interestingly, it seems to gain more readers with time. Foreign diplomats tend to pick it up as a sort of first introduction to Delhi. The book situates the phenomenon of Delhi within India’s re-orientation towards international finance and foreign investment and tries to understand what kind of society is emerging there.

Contemporary Asia is often compared to America in the time of the gilded age, and its billionaires to that period’s Rockefeller, Carnegie and the other robber barons. This allows us to think that we can “know” the future of Asia by looking at the American past. Capital tried to argue that this parallel does not stand up to scrutiny, and that the Asian moment is unique and sui generis. 

At the time I was writing Capital, the foreign press was prone to a kind of American euphoria, which claimed India as a success story for the American model. Akash Kapur, the author of India Becoming (2012), made several comparisons between India’s rapid modernisation and America in “How India Became America”, published in the New York Times (9 March 2012). It was assumed there was a titanic struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, in the broader framework of China and India competing for influence over Asia.

Bill Clinton had visited India in 2000, and during his trip, made strong claims for the genetic resemblances between India and the US – both had emerged from the British Empire, both were constitutional democracies – and he seemed confident that he knew India, as if it were America’s younger sibling. To some, it was important to see America in India; to see laptops and shopping malls. Capital, to a great extent, was written against this view.

When I began the book, I thought it would be very unpopular. The middle classes were concerned that nothing should interrupt the rise in property prices and the stock market, so they were not interested in extensive criticism. But by 2014, when Capital came out, everything had changed. Political corruption, air pollution, and grotesque gender violence had become central preoccupations.

Contrary to my expectations, the book received a great reception in India because people wanted to get to the heart of what was happening in the country. The social fallout from rapid economic change, which was a marginal subject during the boom years, was suddenly everyone’s concern. The mood was dark and the book spoke to this sense of malaise.

In Capital, you discuss the nature of relationships in a society increasingly dominated by the priorities of profit and individualism, in place of older forms of community and identity. And you observe strikingly that in Delhi, they say not “Let me understand you so I may live alongside you” but “I will live alongside you without condition, for I will never understand you”. What is your view about these two, almost diametrically opposed, models of relationality? Is there any hope to relate fully and empathetically to others in a world of strangers?

In relation to the first possibility, I’m sceptical of a cosy ethos of “let’s understand each other”. You hit certain limits with the first approach, as we have done in the last few years in the West, because it’s based on superficial and external cultural knowledge of other cultures in the world, such as the relevant dietary prohibitions. In recent years, in France for instance, we find ourselves in situations which are almost medieval, with mayors imposing pork in certain communities. That was exactly what happened in the Spanish Inquisition.

Of the two possibilities, I actually prefer the second. Often the most stable examples of “multicultural” stability involved coexistence with very little mutual understanding. The Ottoman Empire, for instance, where Jews, Christians and Muslims lived alongside each other in relative harmony for six centuries. The marketplace was the meeting place, but how they got married, how they educated their children, what festivals were celebrated: these were largely the private business of individual communities.

However, India is riven by extremely violent social divisions. If I were to write Capital now, I would write more about caste. Gender, caste and religion provide the deep structure to Indian society, and since they are often enforced by predation, I’m not sure we can rely either on “understanding” or mere “toleration”. 

I’m wondering if we could turn to the topic of Indian literature. Who or what is an Indian writer? And if an Indian writer works in English, there is the linguistic aspect to consider as well?

In a way, the JCB Prize is helping to accelerate the growing interest in Indian literature written in languages other than English. For the two shortlists in 2018 and 2019, five books out of ten were translations, and it wasn’t because the jury was favouring translations, or because translations were more numerous, as they only accounted for 25% of submissions.

As literary works, the translations were more dynamic and freer than the novels in English. For a long time, the postcolonial burden has weighed upon Indian writing. The novel has to represent the nation and explain who the Indian people are. A love story is never simply a love story. This has meant that many of the real struggles that Indians faced have not appeared in literature, because they are seen as minor and un-elevated.

However, people are now more interested in ground-level experiences as the centre of literary endeavour. One of the entries we had last year, My Father’s Garden, concerns a young, tribal, gay man from Jharkhand, who is living out his life erotically. The book is not in any way trying to represent his own tribal community.

The dominance of English literature as genteel literature needs to be broken. But the confidence to write a novel and then the economic resources to do so are still not very well distributed.

Some of the early scholarship on Indian Writing in English calls English a link-language that steps outside these divisions of caste and language. But today, attitudes towards language-use in India seem to be a lot more complex. What implications does this have for literary writing?

Attitudes vary in different parts of the country. The literary psyche is more intact, you might say, in the south. Elites speak English, like everywhere else, but they still read literature in Tamil, Kannada, etc. With Tamil especially, there is an unbroken tradition stretching back thousands of years. And the language is constantly refreshed by great contemporary writing.

In the north of India, by contrast, the number of languages employed, fluently, on a daily basis, has grown fewer. Anecdotally, most of the people I know in Delhi speak either English or Hindi as a first language, and one of the other languages as a second. By comparison their parents would have spoken three languages well, and their grandparents would probably have spoken and written five languages. Their grandparents could probably read and write four scripts: Urdu, Hindustani, Punjabi and English, and possibly an additional Punjabi dialect.

Coincidentally, I’m failing to think of a significant literary figure who has emerged from Delhi in the last fifty years, either in English or in Hindi. Though Arundhati Roy now lives in Delhi, she was born in Kerala. For Salman Rushdie, it was Bombay, and for Amitav Ghosh, Calcutta. Perhaps there is a link between the decline in linguistic richness in Delhi and its lack of an author who truly represents the city.

I should add that I don’t have a problem with English being a lingua franca, and I think it would be wonderful if people were able to use English as a fully literary language, but this shouldn’t come at the expense of other languages.

Unfortunately, the rush to English by people who may not understand it very well has led to the loss of prestige of other languages, and has led to the development not only of a monoculture, but to the degradation of all other cultures.

And by way of bringing the interview to a close, in what ways do you consider yourself a British writer, however artificial or troubled a category that might be?

I usually consider myself a British writer. But I lived in Delhi for seventeen years and it feels strange to come back to the UK. Even after two years, I find it foreign, and I’m bewildered by many of its political and social instincts.

But the category of “British writer” is not just about feeling British, but also about identifying with a literary tradition. Like so many other British writers, I have the rhythms of so many works in my head: the King James Bible, Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot. These works have been part of my formation as a writer, and I constantly return to them. There are certain writers that I take inspiration from, such as Virginia Woolf and George Orwell, who are at home both in fiction and non-fiction; they are essayists and novelists. They have a certain set of political commitments as well, which affects their life outside their writing.

I identify with that brand of British writing, which was critical of society and culturally well-informed. I’m fully aware of the cosmopolitanism of imperial Britain can be critiqued. But we’re at a point right now where nationalism seems virulent and dangerous. National identity is a very complex question and I’m writing about it now, and at great length. I think it’s legitimate to have a certain nostalgia, not for imperial conquest and domination, but nevertheless for the concomitant vastness of political community, which was felt by many colonial subjects as well as in the metropole.

That said, like many other writers, I do question many of the central assumptions of European writing from the last few centuries. Living for a long time outside the West gives you different instincts about questions like: What is progress? What is order? What does a good society look like? Increasingly, I am unconvinced by the Western answers to those questions, and the more time I spend back in the UK, the more apocalyptic the Western universe appears.

Cite this: Ang, Ann. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Elleke Boehmer

In this interview with Elleke Boehmer, Kei Miller reflects on his work, the politics of literary representation, how influenced he is by ideas of his readers or audiences, and how he uses and engages with different voices or forms of address in his writing.

How ought we to present words for people to hear them? What manner of presenting words will be seen as obnoxious or raucous or combative? And who decides on those categories? A big part of what I’m interested in is suggesting that there is a volume at which we might pitch words, that has often been dismissed, but there is music there, and there is complexity there, and there is beauty there.

Recorded on 18 July 2019 at the ACLALS conference in Auckland, New Zealand.

Cite this: Boehmer, Elleke and Kei Miller. “Interview with Kei Miller.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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