The Lounge Chair Interview: 10 Questions with Ikhtisad Ahmed

by Farah Ghuznavi

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Why do you write?

I write to be honest, free and meaningful, to paint important pictures. It is a lifelong commitment to converse with the world, to make sense of it, and make a contribution of substance to it. Writing is a disease with no known cure. There is neither peace nor fulfilment without it. The more we do it, the more we are consumed by it.

Tell us about your most recent book or writing project. What were you trying to say or achieve with it?

I have been polishing a play about garments workers in Bangladesh, scheduled to be staged in the UK next year. At the same time, I wrote a commissioned screenplay for an independent film that tells the origin story of a female detective. It has been a wonderful learning experience, which, in turn, has seen me delve into a previously unexplored literary medium. My most recent book is the short story collection, Yours, Etcetera, which came out at the Dhaka Literary Festival in November 2015, and unlocked the novel that has been festering in my mind for some time, freeing me to begin it. The collection makes a comprehensive statement about what I try to say with my writing: socio-political impressions with the central recurring themes of absurdism, existentialism and humanism.