Megha Majumdar lit up the book world in 2020 with her first novel, A Burning, a galvanizing tale of social media and tyranny. It became a bestseller, was named best book of the year by many publications, and was a finalist for ALA’s Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Born and raised in Kolkata, India, Majumdar studied social anthropology at Harvard, then earned a master’s in anthropology at Johns Hopkins. Her gripping second novel, A Guardian and a Thief, is set in a near-future Kolkata besieged by the ever-worsening climate crisis. It received this year’s Carnegie Medal, which will be presented to Majumdar on June 27 at ALA’s Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago.
How important has reading been to your writing?
Reading is absolutely essential, not only to my writing life but to my sense of peace and well-being as a person. Being borne along by a book—living with its characters, encountering moments of surprise or exhilaration when it teaches me something—makes me feel closer to my own life. Reading is a form of living with attention, just as writing is.
What role have libraries played in your life?
Libraries are among the few remaining places in society where we don’t have to be consumers. We can be people. It’s extraordinary in our society to feel welcomed into a place to read—or to look up information on a computer, prepare a résumé, study for an exam, do a jigsaw puzzle, borrow a telescope—without something being extracted from us. It’s an affirmation of our humanity. As a child, I scoured libraries for Nancy Drew, and as an adult, libraries are often where I write. I have my favorite desks at New York Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library branches, and the atmosphere of everyone working away at their own project changes the quality of time. There’s more of it at the library.
Both of your novels were finalists for the Carnegie Medal. For each, Booklist asked you to create a reading lists. The first is “Politically Engaged Contemporary Fiction”; the second is “For the Pleasure of Plot.” Why are these aspects of fiction central for you?
How does a reader have fun with a book and move through the world of the book exactly as the book intends? Those are craft questions I take seriously. And fiction for me has always been a way of engaging with the world, of attending to its baffling questions, of approaching its vast systems and networks. The scale of the novel seems particularly suited to this task.
Your descriptions of a near-future Kolkata are so vivid. Did you return there while writing this novel?
My parents still live in Kolkata, and I used to visit them regularly, but now that I have two small children, I haven’t been back in a while. The longer I live in the United States, the more I feel that this country provides a lens through which I can glimpse aspects of Kolkata. The humor of its street life, for instance, has grown more apparent to me.
This is a tale of two families and their struggles to survive in increasingly dire situations. One family lives in Kolkata, the other in a village decimated by flooding. What is Boomba’s village based on?
Boomba’s village is inspired by villages in the Sundarbans [in the Ganges Delta in India and Bangladesh]. Some of the practices that I read about during my research—crab collection and honey collection—made their way into the book.
Food is a key theme here, from its place in family life and cultural traditions to the misery of hunger. What did pondering food and famine call up for you?
I come from a family where food is hugely meaningful. Sharing a meal is at the center of family life. What happens when we go to the market and see only algae and cricket flour? How does that alter the emotional texture of Sunday lunch?
Moral dilemmas in desperate situations worsened by the climate crisis abound in your novel. What are the challenges of addressing these matters in such a concise novel that is set over the course of seven fatal days?
Compression is exciting to me. I love putting pressure on my words and sentences to prove themselves. A novel is a claim on a reader’s time, and I take that claim seriously. In this novel, I wanted enough time so that the characters would have room to undergo profound changes, and at the same time, I also wanted a menacing sense of them approaching something dangerous.
Isn’t love what compels us to be a guardian and a thief?
You’re right. I am interested in how intricate, how murky, how vicious love can be.
A Guardian and a Thief has been immensely successful. It’s an Oprah Book Club pick and a Carnegie Medal winner, and you’ve recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship—congratulations! Can you tell us what’s next for you?
I feel very, very grateful. I take it all as encouragement to keep writing. I’m working on a novel that is very different!
