Meet the new Indian rad-lad of Brit literature, Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal.
Your debut novel ‘Tourism’ kicks off with a graphic sex scene with a prostitute. Did you tap into any personal experiences when it came to the sex bits?
I write about sex in the manner I’ve experienced it. I can’t abide euphemisms and won’t use them to deal with anything, let alone something as basic to human life as sex. The sex is also pretty regular stuff. There is nothing out of the ordinary in the book that most people wouldn’t experience in their own sex lives. Those who think it too graphic can go and read something else.
Has your wife (columnist Liz Jones) read the book?
Liz read the book throughout the writing of it. She loved it.
Why did you call it ‘Tourism’?
Tourism is a word that captures the essence of what it is to live in a shifting, cosmopolitan city like London. No one in this city has deep roots here, even the white people are migrants from other parts of the UK or elsewhere. However long you live here, you never truly grasp the city; it is perpetually in flux and changes around you. You are always a tourist.
You’re labelled as the new literary ‘bad boy’ or ‘enfant terrible’. Does that eventually just help sell more copies?
How am I a bad boy? I’m not a drunk or a bar-room brawler. I simply speak my mind. The fact that I am labelled a ‘bad boy’ only highlights how boring others must be in comparison. If the label sells more copies, that’s great.
That said, in an earlier interview you’ve criticised the works of Monica Ali, Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru as “trite”, “twee”, “inane”, “tosh”, “vacuous”, “anodyne junk”.
They do not write honestly about the ethnic experience in Britain. Writers betray their obsessions in their writing: no one writes novels about stuff they aren’t interested in. Their writings show they aren’t interested in Britain’s ethnic minorities because they haven’t sought to deal with the grit and the tensions within those people’s experience. The result is a safe literature that deals with nothing.
What’s next up?
I have plans to write a television drama, do lots more journalism and possibly write another novel - maybe a sequel.
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