Anupama Chandrasekaran says editors are great when they do rewrites where necessary, without asking for multiple iterations from authors.
Former business journalist Anupama Chandrasekaran discovered a few years ago that she enjoyed working with the audio format. She makes Desi Stones and Bones, a podcast on fossils and paleontology, and has written a picture book on the fossils.
The first book you remember reading
Happy Days, a translation of a Russian book; Swami and Friends, perhaps a little later, and Amar Chitra Katha
A character you wish you'd met
Charlie Chaplin
An author you want to meet on the other side
Ismat Chugtai; I'd also love to meet Elena Ferrante and Amitav Ghosh
Your hands-down favourite writer
Other than Ferrante and Ghosh, Atul Gawande and Pranay Lal
Your personal mad tea party guests
Comedians so that the party will be a riot, and shayars because I admire their poetry.
A classic you wish you'd written
I wouldn't dare -- the cadance and the layers of meaning in epics and anything passed on through oral tradition is fascinating, and something I wouldn't want to try my hand at.
Your most unconventional workspaces
Train stations and airports, and sometimes dig sites.
How much of your work has to do with dinosaurs?
Not much at all. This is a common complaint among paleontologists -- that there's a fixation on dinosaurs. But I think they are fascinating creatures, and deserving of that attention. And they are often an entry point into the rest of paleontology.
If you could be a dinosaur for a day, you'd be
A Pterodactyl -- I once saw a fossil of the winged reptile in a Berlin museum and was taken by its beauty. And I feel it represents the cusp of when dinosaurs or reptiles from way back when were evolving into birds.
Editors are...
Great when they're good -- do the research, and the rewrites when required rather than asking for multiple iterations from writers. I appreciate being edited.
Picture books are...
Wonderful, and to keep
If you were in a murder mystery, your choice of weapon would be...
A delicious meal or dish that's poisoned. It should be worth dying for. Perhaps the hazelnut, date and oat fudge my daughter recently made, laced with chocolate and arsenic.
(This is a multi-part interview series with women writers.)
