Q&A with HM Naqvi
The winner of the 2010 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature talks about what inspires him.
What have you been up to since you won the DSC Prize?
I have been working diligently since that heady night in Jaipur, working till six every morning, producing about 300 words a day. I have been working like this for the last seven years and will continue to do so until I die.
How do you think other fiction has dealt with 9/11 and its aftermath?
Any historic event generates a body of work: World War I, World War II, 1947. Home Boy is not the first nor the last work to address what transpired on 9/11. As writers, as human beings, we will continue to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. It’s natural.
Your novel Home Boy constructs vivid cityscapes. What is it about big cities like Karachi and New York that fascinate you as a writer?
I am an urban animal. Consequently, I feel most comfortable in cities, big cities; in megalopolises:Mexico City, Mumbai,Cape Town,Karachi. I would be out of sorts in places that might includeBrusselsor the Midwest, Derbyshire or ruralBaluchistan. Megalopolises provide an ecosystem that allows somebody of my peculiar temperament to flourish: noise, traffic, disparate communities coexisting side by side, a meal or drink at two in the morning.
What can you tell us about your next project?
I am working on a big, bad comic epic set in Karachi that contends with the universe and its vastness.
What advice can you give to aspiring writers?
Real writers write because they have to, because they have an itch. There’s nothing I could tell them that could inform this imperative, nothing that they don’t know already: read at least a book a week and write every day, come hell, high water or a death in the family.
By Iman Qureshi
For information on the writer and his event, click here:
The Worlds I Inhabit
Chelsea Theatre, October 23rd, 2pm
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