Ozeki

As you prepare to be in India to speak at the Jaipur Literature Festival, what are some of the thoughts running through your mind? Have you been to Jaipur, or other parts of India before? I am very excited! I have never been to Jaipur, but so many friends have told me about how beautiful it is. When I was a college student, I spent a year travelling through Asia. This included several months in India, visiting Calcutta, Varanasi, Agra, and Delhi. I was 19 years old then, so this was a very long time ago but I have never…

The first thing the Japanese American author Ruth Ozeki did the morning after winning the Women’s prize for fiction was meditate. “A very short one,” she says when we meet at her hotel later. She was so convinced she wasn’t going to win (Meg Mason and Elif Shafak were the frontrunners) she had planned “a full schedule” for the day. “Not that I’m complaining,” she laughs. Coolly elegant in black, despite the heatwave, the 66-year-old writer has the sort of glow not often seen in post-award ceremony interviews.Ozeki can…