No place for AI in real creative work: The Magnificent Ruins author Nayantara Roy

The novel took me seven years to write, three more to publish. I had to learn how to write in the mornings, before I went to work. Graham Greene once said that if you wrote 500 words a day, for 5 days a week, or edited 5 pages a day for 5 days, you could finish a novel. I took a lot of refuge in that philosophy. I also asked the novelist Sunil Yapa, my friend, to read early drafts, and that process of writers exchanging notes was incredibly helpful.

The narrative is quite cinematic. Do you think your extensive work for television helped with that? If yes, how so?

My work in television involves buying a concept and shepherding it through creative development. Ideas that make it to TV today need a very different attention to plot, pacing, and twists than (in my opinion) a novel.

Literature has the ability to pay close attention to character and detail, small movements, and experimental POV and narrative, in a way that TV today doesn’t seem to be able to afford anymore, because it has to grab the attention of the viewer quickly and fully.

For the most part, it feels like the two mediums utilise very different parts of my brain. But you are right that I am a visual person, and that may be where there is an overlap.

For most of the book, we see the world through the Bengali-American protagonist Lila De’s eyes — the vantage point is that of an outsider looking in. And yet, her perspective never feels American. How did you retain that authenticity in voice?

I was born in Kolkata, like Lila, and know the world she re-enters, intimately. Fiction allows you to conflate lived experience, research, and other people’s accounts of life, and I’m so glad you felt that the novel felt real. And while Kolkata will always be home in the deepest sense, every time I visit, I am aware of the fact that I have not lived in the city since I was a teenager. Lila and I have that much in common, though she is younger and more reckless and fearless.

One review described your book as a “love letter to Kolkata”. How would you describe your relationship with the city in terms of longing and belonging?

No other city captures my imagination like Kolkata. It was where I formed my core memories, where I felt like I entirely belonged without question. There is a mystery and seduction to the city, a deep love of literature and art and culture that it ingrained in me, and where the food and language and spirit feel like a visceral part of my identity. I didn’t set out to write an ode to the city, but I am glad my feelings made their way onto the page.

From its protagonist Lila, the novel changes its perspective in just one chapter towards the end. What made you choose that character, and what were you trying to bring out through that narrative choice?

It was important to me that the family, Lila, and the house itself be seen from a different perspective than the one that we had been in for most of the book. The Lahiris are the post-colonial leftovers of an upper class, Zamindari class. It was important to tilt that POV on its head and reveal a few things about them that only someone who did not belong to the family, who saw it from the outside, could say or think.

The much-publicised withdrawal of a recent novel over suspected use of artificial intelligence (AI) has highlighted how AI seems to be creeping into — and even shaping — creative writing. What’s your stance on the use of AI in creative writing?

There’s no place for artificial intelligence, in my opinion, within real creative work. What emerges from a person’s mind, emotion, cultural context, and specific beliefs cannot be created by a technology. In an era where fact-checking has become crucial, it does not even have a place in most research.

Sisters of a Halved Heart is Nayantara Roy’s upcoming novel. (Source: amazon.in)

Your new novel, Sisters of a Halved Heart, is out later this year (June 2026). What is it going to be about?

Thank you for asking! The novel follows two Indian American half-siblings, Mira and Joy Guhathakurta, and is set in New York. A family betrayal shatters their relationship and permanently alters their lives. Mira flees to London, but when she returns, five years later, the sisters are forced to confront the lies and secrets they have looked away from for so long.

I was born in Kolkata in the 80s, when divorce was rare and half-siblings, even more so. I wanted to write about the specificity of that relationship — fierce belonging but also, a separation caused by different bloodlines — set within the Indian/diaspora context.

The novel has been described as a musing on many kinds of love, which is perhaps my biggest preoccupation.