How was your trip to India? Did you visit India for the first time? Tell us about some of your interesting experiences here.

This was my second visit but as before I felt my senses expanded by the tension between beauty and economic want, by the tension between hope and exuberance.

There are few nations as exuberant as India. And I also had that feeling that although someone from a less-confronting and supposedly developed country that it was fatally easy to make Western-centric judgments, I did not know enough even to begin a tentative assessment of India’s pluralities of gods and identities. I did know however that I was stirred and challenged by them. forth

Did you find any similarity in the culture of India and Australia?

I believe the post-colonial experience has more similarities to Indian experience than most Australians are aware. There is for post-colonials the question of are we good enough, and aren’t we really better, than the imperial folk? India’s ancient arts of course were a bulwark of confidence during Imperial occupation, whereas the Australians had a sense they were starting everything from scratch, but the feelings can be akin. I think our shared cricket-frenzies are in part a matter of trying to validate ourselves in vengeance against an Empire that no longer exists. And I think we should seek to share other things too, particularly rights to each others’ books.

I particularly enjoyed your distinctive sense of humour during the book reading session at Oxford Bookstore Kolkata. I thought you were a funnily serious writer. Do you agree? Why?

I agree with you – it’s peculiar that I can not read or talk for more than two minutes without attempting a joke however lame, and laughing uproariously at it.

And yet, I write the grimmest books about people on the cusp of competing ethnic hysterias, and about men and women faced with nearly impossible moral dilemmas.

I have noticed similar dichotomies in other writers. When I heard Anita Desai speak at the Oxford, I expected a far more assertive, waspish person that the gentle, tentative woman she proved to be.

Please share with us some significant childhood memories that have influenced the course of your life as a writer.

My interest in Aboriginal Australia stems from seeing Aboriginal mothers and their kids going past our garden gate in a country-town named Kempsey. Who are these people? I asked. Why were they further down the totem pole than a working-class brat like me? My father’s absence in North Africa during World War II gave me an abiding interest in that period and in the way colonial people’s get involved in the machinations of a minute continent named Europe. My grandparents were Irish, so amongst the Britannic mainstream of Australia I had something of a sense of having a secret history, a history that was not about fervour for the British Crown, which I thus saw as a dreary institution encouraging the worst habits of obeisance and lackey-dom. There was then considerable mistrust of Irish Catholics, and that sort of experience, of being mistrusted, is a help to the writer, since so much fiction concerns the mistrusted figure, the untouchable, and the scapegoat.

Your historical fiction has won both popular and critical acclaim. What is it about history that inspires and intrigues you – a motivation that finds such a fascinating portrayal in your novels especially?

I have become more confident writing about contemporary issues, but I am acutely aware the past and its ghosts are always with us.

But sometimes it is valid to find in the past a parable for the present and future. I am not of the school that says that we must go to history or be doomed to repeat it.

We repeat it willy-nilly. That is why it is so relevant. It is as L.P. Hartley said another country, but it is also a country of which we are citizens and which claims our attention and is a ruthless conscripter of our imaginations.

You have written extensively on war and its repercussions. Your psychological exploration of a character during war is disturbing yet remarkable. How do you view the modern war on terrorism in the world and its impact on the present generation today?

I have to say I have written about war. It might be because my father was an NCO in the Australian forces during World War II, and sent as a child many memorabilia from the battlefields of Africa when I was a professional child. Sometimes, as in my novel of East Africa, To Asmara, I write from personal experience of the war in Eritrea-Ethiopia. I don’t know whether it’s a healthy fascination or not, but I would also claim that I have written of many other things and that I go to war in my novels less than the real world does. I am still appalled by such phenomena of war as land mines, which amputate child stock-tenders limbs, whose impact I beheld in Eritrea, and by the infamous cluster bombs likewise, and the fact that those who make them are probably normal humans who need a job. Our lethal capacities amaze me still.

I believe that the modern war on terrorism in the West is partly a phony war, used by politicians to crimp our traditional freedoms and our humane impulses. I do not deny that terrorism exists, but the terror of frontal invasion actually encourages it and is ill-equipped to reduce it.

Were you happy with Stephen Spielberg’s treatment of Schindler’s Ark in the film Schindler’s List? Is there anything that you would have liked to change about the award-winning film?

I was happy with Spielberg’s rendition in so far as it stressed very heavily, particularly early in the film, the ambiguity of his motives.

But the more the film succeeded the more it had to leave out. This is the nature of film. It had to leave out the material about Oskar’s membership of the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence, a body in conflict with the SS for control of the national soul. It had to leave out Oskar’s role as a whistle-blower of the Holocaust. And if there is any scene I think ill-advised, it is the scene in which Oskar laments that if he had sold his badge or his Mercedes he could have done more. In reality, he had already taken as many into his camp as he could get away with. Vide the book. But basically I thought it an astonishing and arresting job. The directors consider themselves auteurs for whom the original work is a mere springboard. Accepting those terms, I found the film a work of integrity.

How does a controversy around your work influence you?

A controversy about my work generally used to prostrate me. Authors have very delicate egos. And yet, I enjoyed the controversy about whether Schindler’s Ark was a novel or not, a very frantic controversy following its Booker Prize. Now that I am seventy-one years, I believe that I am immune to controversy and genuinely feel what does it matter as long as your grand children remember you fondly?

Controversy about my work used to upset me greatly when I was young, vain, and distant from death. Now, I hope, I can deal with it more honestly and more calmly. But writers are uncertain about their identity – they invest it in their books, so sometimes controversy – “he shouldn’t have won that prize”; “he can’t write anyhow”; and so on – seems to be a denial of the author’s validity. Almost a denial of existence. But I think that we are men and women before we are writers, and that criticism and controversy, while painful and uncomfortable, must be borne, and that at the end of it we recover, so why not recover early by accepting it stoically?

What do you think of contemporary Australian authors and their writing?

Since I began writing in 1963, there has been an effulgence of Australian writing. Well-known names are Tim Winton, David Malouf, the Nobel-Prize winning Patrick White, Peter Carey, twice a Booker winner, Kate Grenville, winner of the Orange Prize and Booker short-listee. We have always had wonderful poets, since beneath its cricketing persona, Australia has an atmospheric and unique landscape and a pit of yearnings. The problem is that only those Australian writers who are known in London or New York reach you, and only those Indians writers chosen by third parties reach us. I would like to take on this relic of Imperialism and create a more face-to-face contact between Australian fiction and Indian readers, and Indian fiction and Australian readers.

If you had to recommend three books to children, what would these be? Why do you recommend these books?

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

They all enchant children and scare them in exactly the way they want to be scared.

Is there anything that you have not written so far but want to write about because you feel intensely for it?

I have too many ideas floating around in my head to get them written. I would like to fit into fiction for example, a dive I did in a Russian submersible thousands of feet below the sea to hydrothermal vents where there is charming life at enormous pressure in poisonous water in temperatures of 400 Degrees Celsius. The creatures are named Extremophiles, and I’d like somehow to write about them as a new door to the future and a reflection of the extreme ways humans can live. I shall probably never learn enough about the poetry of biology and enzymes to write about it, but then I might.

My only extra statement is: America does have a mad emperor; and the icecaps really are melting. I’ve been to Antarctica and seen it.

And finally, a few words on Oxford Bookstore…

Oxford Bookstore is a charming place, cannily and vividly stocked with the world best books and redolent of the world’s best teas. As a reading venue for writers it is a delight.

May it flourish and multiply.