Mahesh Rao was born and grew up in Nairobi, Kenya.
He studied politics and economics at the University of Bristol and law at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics. In the UK he has worked as a lawyer, academic researcher and bookseller. His short fiction has been shortlisted for various awards, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, The Baffler, Prairie Schooner and Elle. His debut novel, ‘The Smoke Is Rising’, won the Tata First Book Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and the Crossword Prize. ‘One Point Two Billion’, his collection of short stories, was published in October 2015.
Memories and Early influences
Mahesh’s parents hail from Karnataka, India, but they worked in Kenya for many years. They brought Mahesh to the UK when he was in his late teens.
Mahesh remembered;
“Probably unsurprisingly for a writer, I was a bookish child and spent a lot of my time wandering around the school library or the few bookshops that Nairobi had at the time. What I remember is that for quite a long period in Nairobi, even in second hand bookshops, once you had moved on from children’s books, you could largely only get hold of heavyweight classics or endless rows of novels by writers like Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon. So my interior life appeared to move from trying to puzzle out the motivations of Heathcliff and Miss Havisham - to trying to work out what on earth those ladies on the covers of all the James Hadley Chase novels were trying to accomplish.”
Challenges Growing Up
Mahesh felt he was in quite a hurry to become an adult. “I certainly spent a lot of time in the company of people much older than me- or I was on the other side of a sofa, eavesdropping on a lot of their conversations. So the challenge, I suppose, was that the ‘growing up’ wasn't taking place fast enough.”
Genesis of the Writing
Like many people, Mahesh held several different jobs before he committed himself to full time writing. He explained his take on what it takes to be an author.
“I've been a lawyer, academic researcher and a bookseller, and in all of those jobs I've had to grapple with words. I think, however, there is a moment when you realise that there is a bigger story that you need to tell and this didn't happen to me until I was 35. I don’t think you need to have a specific background in terms of education or career. I do think you need to have an affinity with words, great curiosity, an ability to tell a story and a desire to rollick with the opportunities in language. And, crucially, I think you need to be a reader first, and then a writer.”
The biggest difficulties of being a writer and of getting your work published
Mahesh spoke frankly about the biggest headache- it is common to most writers on the planet. In the internet age when social media seduces our attention at every given opportunity, how hard is it sit in front of your screen and tell your story? How do you conquer your fears and stop being scared of failure?
“I think the hardest thing is the discipline of committing to your project every day and sitting down to get the words on the page. My first book was rejected by numerous agents, and then, publishers. One of the most important lessons for any writer is to learn how to cope with rejection. The truth is that you never stop failing in one way or another even after your first book is published — and in amongst all the talk of rewards and success, it's actually very important to talk about failure and how to keep going.”
The second hardest thing for an author is to structure the writing process to fit into the rest of his or her life, or fit the rest of his or her life around the writing, we guess. What is the secret to Mahesh’s success?
“You just have to treat it like any other job. I tell myself I have to start by a certain time and get a certain number of words down each day. And probably the most important thing is to turn off the Internet.”
Mahesh Rao is involved in two events at the forthcoming Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival;
Asia’s Forgotten Lives, May 17, 2016, and the Closing Night Special, A Passage Across India, May 18th.
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In amongst all the talk of rewards and success, it's actually very important to talk about failure and how to keep going
