Who would you like to meet at JLF?

Mark Tully
Journalist and writer

My family was British, but had settled in India. I myself was born in India. To that end the one writer I'd dearly have loved to have met is Rudyard Kipling. But we're talking of living authors and that would have to be Jim Crace whose novel Quarantine I finished reading recently. Quarantine tells the Biblical story of Jesus Christ's 40 days spent in the desert. Normally I sit on the back of books without any justification. But this is the most amazing writing I've read in a very long time. And the way Crace brings out the underlying mysticism is something I will never forget.

If I meet him, I'd like to ask him how far his writing is natural and how far something he has acquired. Then I'd like to ask him what his own belief is about Jesus and about asceticism, about the early Christian ascetics called the Desert Fathers. I'd like to talk to him about them and whether he thinks they were taking things far too far or whether there was value in the way they had lived their lives.

Jerry Pinto
Journalist, poet, author

I should like to meet Haruki Murakami. I think he is wonderfully different in almost every book that I've read and so one gets no sense of the central entity that is producing these books. Often, when you have read someone consistently for a long time, you get a sense of the person who must be writing the book. But with Murakami, it's a different call. So I'd like to chat with him — probably it would be across the barrier of translations. I'd like to ask him about his attraction to Kafka, and whether the fact that he has been wildly translated into English has made any difference to him.

It is often assumed that English is a passport to a wider audience but people like Murakami have huge audiences in the languages they write in — in his case, Japanese. I would like to talk about the construction of the books.

Some seem free-flowing, as if they've been discovered as they are written, like Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and there are some that are heavily structured like IQ84.

Bee Rowlatt
Journalist and writer

Who would I love to meet? If I met Toni Morrison, I would try not to faint. I wouldn't ask her anything, I'd probably just make some gurgling noises and then have to be dragged off her ankles. Ali Smith is another superstar, a stunning writer both on the page and as a speaker. I saw her at a UK festival recently. She walked up and announced "I speak very quickly", at which point I thought she was going to apologise. But she didn't, she just blasted us. It was like sitting in a hurricane of words, and every single word was perfect. All we could do in the audience was stare, open-mouthed.

If I'm not allowed to request dead writers, which eliminates Ismat Chughtai and Begum Rokeya, then I'd like to meet Arundhati Roy, who is on my hero list. I nurture a lingering writer-crush on the biographer Richard Holmes. The list goes on. Part of me admires anyone who has the guts to dedicate their life to words. After all, that's why we all come to JLF!

Ashwin Sanghi
Novelist

The one person I have missed at Zee-JLF is Salman Rushdie. I am a big fan of his Midnight's Children. It's one of the books that has tremendously and very deeply influenced me. The year he was scheduled to come, it became a huge controversy and he had to call it off.

Probably his most interesting, though it's not his best book — apart from Midnight's Children, which is a class apart – is the autobiography Joseph Anton. It's this book that I find very interesting because of the fact that it's about his life when he was on the run.

Rushdie has attempted to explain how it was and what he went through. Sometimes I wonder whether now, when he is in a much more comfortable space, whether he misses the excitement. It's a perverse question but sometimes when you have gone through eight-nine years of being in that sort of scenario, normal life becomes boring.

Manju Kapur
Writer

Literary festivals are full of surprises. After long experience with them, I don't really go to hear authors I know — though that has its own charm — but I go to learn things about authors I don't know. Learn about subjects for example that I have thought little about (war in the Balkans, or alcoholic writers, or being a journalist in war-torn areas). And then it is stimulating to listen to someone who has a passion, who has spent hours thinking about what they do, and how they do it, who has emerged from days, weeks and years of solitude immersed in their art.

I relate to them as a reader (potential or otherwise — oh this sounds interesting, maybe I'll buy the book, maybe I've discovered someone new) and as a writer (oh, so that's how they go about it — I do it that way too, or I can never do it that way), etc. So lit fests are opportunities to discover, to be pleased, to emerge from a writing life that can often be lonely.