Hot on the heels of announcing the Man Booker Prize shortlist for 2007, the organization catches up with last year’s winner, Kiran Desai, after a year-long worldwide tour:
Having won the prize, do you feel a different kind of pressure surrounding your next novel?
No. I don’t notice outside pressure if I’m really working. My self-consciousness vanishes. In the end, there is only myself and my book keeping each other company, alone together, perverse and happy. The pressure is only that of making the book work for it seems impossible to write a perfect book. Yet, of course, as a reader, I hunger for it. It’s a constant desire and I know I’ll write another book for that reason. There is always the feeling that something got away. Where is that thing – the sublime novel? What would it feel like to hold that in my hands? Whenever I come across it as a reader, I read trembling. Like any art form, when it works, the person experiencing it exists in a form of grace. I hunger for that feeling as a writer as well as a reader.
Desai is vague about her next project, which is understandable in light of the long gap between novels one and two. No doubt the gap will be almost as wide between two and three…