Citizen of the world: Rana Dasgupta on state, cities and writing a book

Dasgupta talks about what it means to be the director of a major literary prize and his new book

Rana Dasgupta is a busy man. He is the literary director of the JCB Prize, one of the most lucrative awards for Indian fiction writers. He has been teaching in Brown University and organising conferences in Europe. How does all this public activity affect his writing, which is essentially a private pursuit? His last book, Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi — which won the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage, 2017, and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize — was published five years back, and he says he is still