Q&A: WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
William Dalrymple author and impresario, on Jaipur, books, and the novelist he's dying to meet
Q. What’s your favourite place in Jaipur?
Personally, I love Galta Ji, outside the walls, up in the hills. It’s where the old tantriks and sadhus used to hang out. It’s a mountain filled with 18th century havelis and temples, tanks and burial grounds and cremation grounds and it’s wild and unvisited—which I long for in India.
Q. What book excited you the most in 2017?
Probably Maya Jassanoff’s The
Dawn Watch. It’s an extraordinary biography—or study—of Joseph Conrad. It’s part biography, part criticism, part travel book, written in beautiful prose. She’s one of my favourite non-fiction authors. She’s one of the Jaipur stars I’m most looking forward to hearing.
Q. JLF has been a huge success. Anything you hope to change in the future?
It’s more than a huge success. It’s been a sort of miracle. It attracts the biggest authors in the world, and we’re one of the few festivals that doesn’t pay authors, and it’s the only major literary festival in the world that’s free. Our audience’s average age is probably 20 or
21, and there are about 700 kids sleeping rough at the Jaipur railway station (to attend). It’s like a sort of pop-up circus of geniuses.
Q. Is there any writer at the top of your wish list?
If I could wave a magic wand, my personal request to the good fairy or the devi or whoever is granting this wish would be Cormac McCarthy, who’s my favourite contemporary novelist. But he’s a recluse and never leaves America and never attends festivals. Peter Carey writes the funniest refusal letters each year.