Opinion Derek O’Brien writes: Books will survive the AI invasion, if their fate is in the hands of women
If women stopped reading, the book market would collapse overnight. And if women are reading, why are we not talking enough about women who write?
2025 has indeed turned the spotlight on some exceptional Indian women writers. 
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A friend told me not to do a column on this subject. It is completely pointless writing about three women, international literary rock stars, who get thousands of column centimetres of media attention and are feted all over the world. Why bother to write a column on these three much-decorated writers? They get enough.
In a 2007 article, ‘Why Women Read More Than Men’, Eric Weiner writes, “A couple of years ago, British author Ian McEwan conducted an admittedly unscientific experiment. He and his son waded into the lunch-time crowds at a London park and began handing out free books. Within a few minutes, they had given away 30 novels. Nearly all of the takers were women, who were ‘eager and grateful’ for the freebies while the men frowned in suspicion, or distaste.” The inevitable conclusion, wrote McEwan: “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”
So here I am writing about how women read, and if women stopped reading, the book market would collapse overnight. And if women are reading, why are we not talking enough about women who write?
2025 has indeed turned the spotlight on some exceptional Indian women writers. Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi won the International Booker for Heart Lamp, a collection of short stories all centred around the life of Muslim women, mostly in Karnataka. Earthy and honest, the stories have now been read by thousands of readers in India alone. Mushtaq and Bhasthi have been deservedly celebrated all over the country and outside. The author of Heart Lamp knows intimately the lives of the women she has written of, as an activist, a lawyer and a chronicler. The translator has caught every nuance of dialect and attire and food in these stories, and together these two women have become part of India’s literary history.
Meanwhile, far away from Karnataka, India, Kiran Desai, who lives in Queens, New York, spent 20 years writing her next book after her Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss. A story of modern love, of Indians far away from India, every word Desai has written has been polished over years of being dedicated to the story she had to tell. Hours after her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I asked her, “What discipline did you follow to work on a book for 20 years?” Here is what she told me: “I follow a discipline that I think is so deeply embedded in me now after all of these years of working. Every morning I go straight to my desk. I think of it as a spiritual discipline, a code of austerity that I keep so that I can work well. Every single day I work like an ant or a bee or an earthworm. Just transposing one little molecule of real life into artistic life, just carrying, transposing it every day. Like transferring one little crumb into the artistic realm and working without knowing, without a vision of what I’m working towards. So really like an ant, you know, the vision is beyond the horizon for me for very many years.”
Desai’s mother, the legendary Anita Desai’s book Rosarita made it to Barack Obama’s 2025 list of summer reads. If Anita Desai can write like this at 88, we should all be inspired. It is a gem of a book about a woman from India who goes to Mexico in pursuit of independence and art.
And speaking of Booker winners, what about the woman who started it all, Arundhati Roy? Her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me is a riveting account of an unusual childhood, of a difficult parent, and of how a woman cannot be neatly labelled always as the perfect mother or daughter. Perhaps it’s also about the creation of a writer. She writes, “I’ve thought of my own life as a footnote to the things that really matter. Never tragic, often hilarious. Or perhaps this is the lie I tell myself. Maybe I pitched my tent where the wind blows strongest, hoping it would blow my heart clean out of my body. Perhaps what I’m about to write is a betrayal of my younger self by the person I’ve become. If so, it’s no small sin. But I’m in no position to be the judge of that.”
But if we talk about women who write, then why not close the gap and also talk about the women who take books to readers? In many cities across the country, my friend tells me, independent stores and libraries are coming up started by women. Their aim? To take the books the last mile to readers. Away from the algorithm of Amazon, there are more and more women out there who are talking to book buyers, readers young and old, and trying to put their next magical read into their hands.
Are women the future of reading, writing and the creation of books? I don’t know. But if they are, then this son of a woman who was a primary school teacher, and husband of a woman who reads voraciously, is sure books will outlive the invasion of AI.
And finally, can any article on authors who happen to be women be complete without at least a mention of a lady of Indian origin? She was born in England, and now lives between Rome and New York. She writes fluently in English and Italian. Oh yes, she speaks fluent Bengali too — her mother tongue. If you still haven’t worked out which Pulitzer Prize winner I am referring to — turn the page.
The writer is MP and leader, All India Trinamool Congress Parliamentary Party
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