Grey wallpaper on laptop & other writing rituals of author Ratika Kapur

Ratika Kapur broke onto the Indian literary scene in 2012 with Overwinter, a family drama that carried sharp observations about muddled familial relationships. The book got her a Man Asian Literary Prize nomination. Three years later, in 2015, she released The Private Life of Mrs Sharma, about a dutiful Indian housewife striving for the New Indian Dream who decides to let her hair down a bit. With her second novel, Kapur, a former fiction editor in a publishing house, has been welcomed as an incisive and fresh new voice on the Indian literary scene. Edited excerpts from an interview:

What have been your favourite books over the years?
I suppose I won't be given room to list them all, so here's a sampling: The Emigrants by WG Sebald, The Heart Has Its Reasons by Krishna Sobti, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, The Master of Petersburg by JM Coetzee, The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin and many 19th century Russian novels.

What are your guilty pleasures?
Solitude. And cheese.

What are your influences in literature?
Just as it is difficult to single out factors that shape how you view the world, it's difficult to single out works that have influenced your writing. So much of what influences us, influences us subliminally, in ways that we don't fully know or understand. Having said that, there are specific writers I consciously and actively turn to for aspects of craft, writers like JM Coetzee for the precision and rigour of his prose, Lydia Davis and James Salter for their sentences and Roddy Doyle for narrative voice.

Is there any ritual you are fixated upon when writing? Is there a corner of the house you write better in or a particular kind of paper you use?
I don't know if these could be termed rituals but I do have a few necessary conditions: a place of quiet, a spot where I can slide into a recumbent position when I please (which, I'm afraid, is often) and a laptop with a plain grey wallpaper.

If you were given a chance to be a literary character, who would you be? And why?
I think I'd be John Ames from Marilynne Robinson's Gilead because he has the ability to create wisdom out of pain.

What would you fix on the Indian literary scene?
I'd want to move the discussion away from literary people and literary personalities and steer it towards the literary works instead, to, say some nerdy chitchat about the perfectly constructed sentence.

What are you reading now?
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. I'm still on the fence about it.

Literary festivals or a small gathering at a bookstore for your book's reading. And why?
Neither. As much as I'd like to do public readings, I suffer from an aggressive form of stage fright.