Aravind Adiga

Last fall the Independent facilitated a Q & A between some of its readers and Booker prize-winning author Aravind Adiga. A couple of the exchanges:

You studied under Simon Schama in the US. Did he offer you any memorable advice about writing? Stephen Parkinson, Basingstoke

Schama was a terrific teacher. He made us read several authors whom I've never forgotten: Jules Michelet and Roberto Calasso, for instance. But the best advice I got about writing came not from him but from a friend (who claimed that he got it from the American author Richard Ford): If you want to make a living as a writer, young man, remember to marry well. (I haven't followed it, alas.)

Arundhati Roy was a compatriot of yours who like you won the Booker with her debut novel, and she has not written another in over 10 years. Could the same thing happen to you? Tim Blake, Brighton

A book of short stories that I wrote before The White Tiger – called Between the Assassinations – has just been published in India, and will come out in the United Kingdom next year. I'm working on another manuscript as well. The odds are good that you'll be asking the next Indian-born Booker winner, "Will you keep bombarding us like the last chap, or leave us in peace for a while?"

Read more of the Q & A.

The Page 69 Test: The White Tiger.

--Marshal Zeringue