Nilanjana Roy is an Indian author, journalist and editor.

Her novels include Black River (2022), which was listed as one of the best crime novels of 2023 by The Guardian; The Hundred Names of Darkness (2013); The Wildings (2012), which won the 2013 Shakti Bhatt First Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2013 Commonwealth Prize, the 2012 Tata First Book Literary Award, and the 2017 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize; and a collection of essays, The Girl Who Ate Books (2016).

Nilanjana has also edited three anthologies—Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories from India’s Best Writers (2021); A Matter of Taste: The Penguin Book of Indian Writing on Food (2004); and Patriots, Poets and Prisoners: Selections from Ramananda Chatterjee’s The Modern Review, 1907-1947 (2016), which she co-edited with Anikendra Sen and Devangshu Datta.

Nilanjana also writes a regular column on books and reading for the Financial Times, called Reading the World.

Talking About Books interviewed Nilanjana on her novels and on reading widely.

TAB: Black River is, in a sense, unlike your first two novels: it is a crime novel and a social commentary, covering issues such as the exploitation of the vulnerable. What was the inspiration behind it?

NR: Black River grew slowly, over several years. I’d worked as a reporter for the New York Times on the gender beat, and never grew used to the many murders of young girls and women that were a casual feature of life in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. That anger and anguish was the first spark; I felt a deep sadness at the lives lost, at the possibilities and dreams of women’s lives that were so brutally extinguished. But as I walked around the city, and went to places that I might not have explored on my own, I also began to see Delhi itself through the eyes of migrants and workers who felt a sense of possibility in this megalopolis that they had often, literally, helped to build.

The third strand came from the years we’ve collectively lived through, years when politics has severed old relationships, old ways of living side by side and forging friendships over divides. This has been a time of pollution, and we’re choking on the hatred in the air that divides citizens into inheritors of a new India and the persecuted, the hounded.

TAB: In Black River, you describe the lives of the poor in Delhi—the people who are essential to the functioning of the city but go unnoticed. How were you able to paint such a vivid picture of their lives?

NR: Thank you — I learned very early through stories on homeless women in Delhi or on migrants that the poor are as individual as the rich, have to be resilient and resourceful in order to survive, and that their imaginations and dreams are often tremendously playful and powerful. It took years of conversations and friendships before I felt that I had permission to write about this world.

My life is bookmarked with privilege of multiple kinds, and all I can say is that over years of walking around and meeting people on their terms, I was lucky to be granted great generosity and openness. You can’t write about people, even fictional, until you have earned their trust; you don’t have a right to steal anyone’s life for a novel, but over time, I felt that my characters, from Chand to Rabia and Ombir, had finally begun to trust me with their lives and their stories. It was only then that the pen began to move on the page.

TAB: The Wildings and The Hundred Names of Darkness are about the cats of Nizamuddin and how they try to survive in an often hostile world. Why did you choose to tell this story through cats?

NR: Two reasons—Delhi is, like many Indian cities, a metropolis that is heavily populated by animals, and it belongs to cats, dogs, monkeys, cheels and other strays as much as it does to humans. Perhaps both Black River and The Wildings series are curious about what this city, so ancient but so recently constructed, feels like to anyone who is an outsider, or has to find space for themselves in an often harsh and hostile environment that also offers unexpected joys and graces.

And the second reason: my husband and I have been adopted by multiple cats, and when I began paying attention to them, especially the outside cats, they took me into a world that was so fascinating that I had to try to capture it on paper!

TAB: Your column in the Financial Times focuses on books from around the world. How, in your opinion, has the publishing landscape evolved over the last two decades, in terms of readers having access to a wider range of authors?

NR: The two biggest and most heartening changes have been driven by a younger generation of readers—globally, it’s the under-30s who are far more open to reading books in translation, and they are also eclectic readers, often refreshingly free of literary snobbery. They treat genres like romance, crime fiction and SFF with respect, and though this is a generalization, I’d say that younger readers brush aside barriers and gatekeeping. I love writing that column because we have a global and very engaged readership at the FT—the challenge for me is to persuade readers to try more fiction and poetry, when many in the over-40 age group are probably more comfortable with non-fiction.

TAB: Does your work as a journalist inform your novels?

NR: I’ve been extremely lucky to work with ethical and gifted editors like Tony Joseph and TN Ninan at the Business Standard, and Jeanne Moore at the old New York Times of the late 2000s. They taught me to research, to get out of my head and talk to people—and to listen, ideally, more than you talk—and most of all, to follow my curiosity. Fiction offers acres of freedom, but I am indebted to my mentors in journalism for teaching me (or trying to teach me) discipline, respect for your readers, and some craft. I’m glad to have the chance to thank them, and I also owe a debt to journalists and writers like Neha Dixit, Priyanka Dubey and Annie Zaidi, who taught me more than they might guess.

TAB: When did you start writing and who were your influences?

NR: Oh god—I wrote weird little stories when I was five or six, and terrible poetry and even worse plays in my late teens, and slightly better short stories (mercifully lost) in my twenties. I didn’t take any of this seriously, but I loved reading, and wrote for fun. Looking back, I probably started writing half-seriously when I blogged as Hurree Babu over at Kitabkhana in the late 1990s or early 2000s, though I published my first novel only in 2013.

I am the opposite of the refined reader with classical tastes; I’m an omnivore who used to read everything I could find in Bengali and English, and later in Hindi. But if you’re asking about crime fiction influences, even though I didn’t consciously set out to write noir or crime—probably Lolita (Nabokov sets his novel up as a rapist’s confession, and it ends with a murder), Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Sharadindu’s Byomkesh novels, Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River and a ton of Agatha Christie, who taught me that the clockwork of a crime novel could be as beautiful and intricate as the movement of a watch.

TAB: Thank you for sharing your thoughts and your insights. I look forward to reading more from you!

Go to my review of Black River.

Go to Nilanjana Roy’s website.