Madhulika Liddle shot to fame with her first novel The Englishman’s Cameo - a detective story set in 17th century Delhi. With stints in hospitality (Habitat World) and in advertising later, this instructional designer took to full time writing in 2008. Ready with a sequel that is not a novel, but an anthology of short stories, the bubbly writer confesses, “I'm better at writing short stories.” She talks about how she turned writer and why she chose history as the backdrop of her novel.
How did writing happen?
I first wrote a short story perhaps when I was about six years old and over the years continued to write stories -which only my family would read. It was in 2001 that I was coaxed by family and friends into submitting a short story for a competition in Femina. And I went on to win! The prize was a Mont Blanc pen. That was it. Then in 2002, I got an honourable mention (which was 100 pounds) in the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association’s Short Story Competition for a story titled Love and the Papaya Man. For the same competition, the next year, my story A Morning Swim won a prize of 2,000 pounds. And a five-story collection of my stories won the Oxford Bookstore e-Author ver 4.0 Competition in 2006 - a reward of Rs 50,000. I was on a winning spree.
Since then, a number of my works - short stories, travelogues, etc - have been published in various newspapers, magazines, websites and anthologies, besides being broadcast on radio and winning awards. I’d been very keen on getting an anthology of my short stories published. But the general feedback from publishers seemed to be that a first book should be a novel, not a set of short stories. Thus, was born “The Englishman’s Cameo.”
Full interview here Times of India
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