Anuk Arudpragasam (Incoming Writing Fellow 2021) spoke with Shivani Radhakrishnan at The White Review about his second novel, A Passage North, the connections between philosophy and literature, and his own writing experience. The interview was featured in the magazine’s latest issue, and can be read here.
“Certain things I previously did unthinkingly suddenly felt frivolous or absurd or disrespectful, certain forms of humour or gossip, for example, or certain forms of lightheartedness. The fact that my first novel was so central to my inner life for three years meant that the rest of my life was subject to constant scrutiny, an interrogation of what was consonant and what was dissonant with the consciousness of genocide. My second novel is about that interrogation, about the everyday life of that consciousness.”