Featured Interview With Dipika Mukherjee
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I started writing very young. With our constant moving, writing gave me some structure, it was something I was consistently good at even when the curriculum changed at different schools. I had my first poem published in a newspaper in Wellington when I was about 10, a really juvenile rhymed piece that makes me cringe now, but that was where it all began. Wellington was a great place to flex my writing muscles; they have Katherine Mansfield plus Maori folklore and lots of magic happens.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I read EVERYTHING. I do like women who take on politics, like Arundhati Roy and Margaret Atwood and Naomi Shihab Nye (poetry). I love “Midnight’s Children” but not much else by Rushdie; I have little author loyalty so even with Amitav Ghosh, I did love some of his earlier books, but not so much the trilogy. I love the current chicklit being written by Anuja Chauhan in India where she takes on Indian politics in Hinglish and I am devouring all of Tana French’s books as she is the most amazing mystery writer. Elena Ferrante was great, as was Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission”. Right now I am reading Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” and trying to figure out a strategy to deal with our current political situation without going mad. I really like Atul Gawande and Malcolm Gladwell.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Shambala Junction is a story that explores a serious issue (how international adoptions are fuelling child trafficking) but it is as much about clueless Iris Sen finding herself as it is about finding a missing baby about to be sold to a rich westerner. It took me about four months to churn out a first draft of this book (no kidding!) then six long years to polish it so that it became publishable and won the Virginia Prize for Fiction in the UK in 2016. It is hard to write about a serious topic engagingly — the writerly soapbox is so easy to climb on and then topple over — so it was a lot of work making the characters all engaging. There are some villains in this story, but I hope that I have shown that poverty and desperation leads to more victimhood than anything else. Sometimes we are complicit in a crime without even knowing it. I love the feedback coming in on Goodreads and Amazon — readers have been overwhelmingly positive. I was concerned that readers in Asia may find some characters pandering to a stereotype, or that American audiences may just not want to look at the horrors in another country, but all is good, readers all seem to agree that the book works, no matter where they are geographically.
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