Salil Tripathi - “These writers exemplify courage in its rawest form”
Hindustan TimesHow did you and artist Shilpa Gupta end up working together on this anthology? How did your experience of chairing PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee and co-chairing English PEN’s Writers at Risk Committee shape this anthology? Other writers who are PEN members, including current president, the Turkish-Kurdish writer Burhan Sonmez, former president the Mexican novelist Jennifer Clement, and writers who had been imprisoned, like Uganda’s Stella Nyanzi, Myanmar’s Saw Wai and Ma Thida, Palestine’s Dareen Tatour, and Iran’s Fatemeh Ekhtesari, and other writers like the Paris-based Indian poet Karthika Nair, James Byrne in the UK, and the Australian writer Ali Cobby Eckermann, who are outraged by writers being forced into exile or being persecuted, besides many others, enthusiastically agreed to join. In the poem My Mother’s Fault, you write, “I live abroad: what do I know of India?” How do you feel when your relationship with and knowledge of India is questioned? When the India at 75 anthology was critiqued for over-representation of savarna, especially Brahmin voices, you commented by saying, “Excellent statistical analysis of people’s ethnicities, if true.
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