Header image used with permission (permission granted from author). Kiran Bhat <https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7108337.Kiran_Bhat>
Kiran Bhat is a novelist whose main focus rests on global issues and the environment. His recent works include We of the Forsaken World and Autobiografia, and he is currently working to condense his worldwide experience into a multimedia project, released monthly, titled Girar.
I chose to interview Kiran because of his expertise and technical experience in the writing field – I also find it fascinating the way he contextualises his immense worldview into his work.
Transcript:
Kel: Hi everyone, Kel here and I’m with Kiran Bhat, author of We of the Forsaken World, released in 2019. I started with asking Kiran a little bit about his most recent project, Girar (a Spanish verb meaning ‘to turn’), which is a multi-platform, subscription-based narrative planned for release in December of this year. Specifically, he told me about what inspired and motivated him to start such a complicated project.
Kiran: I was in a Spanish cathedral-slash-mosque-slash-synagogue and I had this something that we talk about in Hinduism called a darshana, you know, in a moment in which you just feel the sudden moment of enlightenment, you suddenly feel this, kind of space where the divine is speaking to you. And I just felt that I had to create something that much in the same way this cathedral/synagogue/mosque was unifying all the history of Spain inside of one monument, I wanted to create something that could unify the world in a work of literature or art…
So I had this moment, this vision, this moment of alignment with the stars and I just realised, I wanted, and you know living in Spain was this moment I needed for my writing where I realised I didn’t want to just be a person that lived in one place, and you know despite living much of my life in the U.S., Spain spoke to me more. It was a country I barely knew and yet I felt more like the people there and I felt a connection to it that was deeper than anything I’d ever had previously…
I wanted to play with this slow burn, the way that we as humans over the course of a decade change and evolve and adapt and become new people. And so I wanted to chart these people slowly over the course of a decade how they minutely change, how you know, over a year you just change by less than one percent but that less than one percent feels like it was one hundred percent, you know? And I wanted to play with that over the course of a decade. But, being a global citizen and someone who wanted to invest in a globalised literature, and literature for the world, I wanted to write something that was global, I want to write something that belonged to the world, I wanted the entire world in one book. And so I started to – you know and that was really the vision I had when I was in Spain in 2011, I wanted to write something that could collapse the world in a book and I just didn’t know how to do it, but then I like this idea of like, taking incidences of my – not my life, but things and fragments of my family, and blurring them into like, unknown environments and places I didn’t fully own or possess. Blurring those things together and that became the idea of Girar.
Kel: He also informed me about his current projects outside of Girar.
Kiran: I spend a lot of my time working on literary criticism. I publish heavily in like, journals like I’ve gotten things accepted by the Kenyan Review, the Brooklyn Rail, the Colorado Review, all of which are fairly decently big magazines in the U.S. and the Caravan, which are like big magazines in India…
I’m someone who would like to probably work on my fiction and this giant project and then on the side I probably would write literary criticism and poetry in the different languages I speak…
Kel: Finally, I asked Kiran what advice he might like to give to aspiring writers new to the field.
Kiran: When you’re ready to publish then you just have to just start knocking down and, you know, just trying to talk to anyone who’s willing to help you and trying to get your foot in the door, because it is a small world and you have to just try to make yourself one the people, one of the few people that people actually listen to…
You might think you’re ready but you might not in fact be ready. You might actually be still very far from being ready and it’s hard to tell unless you really know your writing and your craft and what you’re trying to say. You just have to push yourself and just try to open up all the doors. And believe in your work – be your biggest advocate and know that you’re saying something that’s important and you believe it needs to reach other people’s ears, because otherwise why would you even do this in the first place, you know? If you believe you have something to say, don’t be afraid to speak out…
Ultimately the people who will listen to you, will listen to you, and you should never be afraid of them.
Music used with permission (Creative Commons). Fanchisanchez <pixabay.com>
Raquelle Varadi 