I'm still a bit dubuous about whether or not I should be including Aravind Adiga here as an "Australian" writer. He was educated in Sydney and his father still lives there, but the author seems to spend the bulk of his time in India these days, when he's not on a literary promotion tour. We'll stay with him for a while.
While I attempt to come to grips with that dilemma Adiga was interviewed by Fiona McCann in "The Irish Times".
'I've failed at just about everything I've tried," says Aravind Adiga with convincing diffidence. "Which is why I've got to be a novelist." He is sitting in a hotel bar at Dublin Airport, fresh off a flight from London where he's been promoting his new book, Between the Assassinations , less than a year after taking home the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger . Yet despite the latter's international success, Adiga seems determined not to rest on his laurels. The Indian author's face is boyish, its expression earnest, and he speaks quickly in a musical accent, his sentences spilling forth as he insists that writing is his last resort. "I'm good at nothing else. What else can I do? I flopped as an academic and I don't like being a journalist, so there's not much else to do really. This is it. This is what lazy people end up doing."
For a man with the literary world at his feet, Adiga is astoundingly self-deprecating. Despite placing pieces in prestigious publications, such as Time magazine and the Financial Times during his short-lived journalistic career, he still describes it as "something to do before I did my novel". It was a career, he says, he began mainly to guard against his insecurity about returning unemployed to India after studies at Columbia University in New York and Oxford.
A novel about an Indian character's experiences in Australia would, while being topical, also tend to sway me.
