‘My creative relationship with India remains my strongest motivating force’: Salman Rushdie

You have been vocal in your criticism of Cancel Culture. If you were to choose a moment in recent history that would reflect this turn towards censorship, what would that be?

The triple triumphs of (former US President) Donald Trump, (British Prime Minister) Boris Johnson and Narendra Modi.

In one of the early essays in this collection, you write that the books that one truly loves speaks of who the person is at that moment in time. Which books would make it to your list of favourites and what does that say about you?

It’s a long list, but it includes the work of Charles Dickens, Miguel de Cervantes, Italo Calvino, Mikhail Bulgakov, Franz Kafka, JL Borges, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Anita Desai, RK Narayan, and, more recently, the African-American writers Jesmyn Ward and Natasha Trethewey, and such authors as Junot Diaz, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Edwidge Danticat. What does it say about me? Probably, that I’m still a bookworm.

Could you tell us about the play you are working on?

It’s about Helen of Troy. It’s written in verse. I think of Greek tragedy as belonging to the world, and take inspiration from the way Peter Brook made The Mahabharata into a sort of world theatre. We’ll see. I hope the work may see its first production in the UK — probably next year, because of theatres’ COVID-19-created backlogs of already-commissioned plays.