In conversation with Orhan Pamuk this Friday

This Friday, the 21st of January, on the opening morning of the Jaipur Literature Festival, I'm going to be in conversation with Orhan Pamuk for an hour at a discussion called "Pamuk and the Art of the Novel".

I've always loved Pamuk's novels (which I find serious and playful in exactly the right proportions), and consider him fundamental to my own education as a novelist. His work combines, in a very original way, the realist novelist's love of psychological exploration and a compelling "illusion of reality" with a postmodernist's skepticism, trickery, and self-consciousness about form. My Name Is Red and The Musem of Innocence are two of the greatest stories about love, desire, the body, and time that I've ever read. An old post from 2006 on Pamuk's novel My Name Is Red is here, and a long review of his book of essays Other Colours here.

I'll also be in conversation with the Scottish novelist James Kelman, winner of the Booker Prize in 1992 for How Late It Was, How Late, at 3.30 that afternoon, and will be moderating a panel discussion called "Imaginary Homelands" on the afternoon on the 22nd.

Last, you'll find on sale in the festival bookshop the Indian edition of my anthology India: A Traveller's Literary Companion, just out this month from HarperCollins. The introduction to the book is here, and a short interview about how I put the book together here.

See you in Jaipur!