No writer in recent years has stormed into the Indo-Anglian literary scene the way Anees Salim has. The Kerala-based author won the Hindu Prize for Best Fiction 2013 for his brilliant and ‘dark comic tale’ Vanity Bagh. Sabin Iqbal profiles the adman-turned-author whose humour cuts through the skin and leaves some pain in the heart: Tehelka
“Naipaul never went to any writing workshop,” says Anees. “In fact, no good writers that we now admire have gone to any creative workshop nor are they products of any systematic training.”
The good writers who have attended writing workshops would have anyhow become good writers. “One has to have some kind of pain or unhappiness to go about writing,” says Anees. Once, his father had given him a photocopy of a 400-page foreign book on how to write a novel. “It (the book) was not available in India then, but I couldn’t go beyond 50 pages of how to structure your writing. Textbooks would have killed my writing,” he says.
