India I have visited a great many times, though there is a lot about it I will never understand.

I've been wanting to write a book about what goes into creating a novel, and the story behind 'A Passage to India' is especially interesting.

I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India.

Almost overnight, white people have gone from being very powerful to potentially irrelevant. Their future in South Africa is not what many had envisaged, so it involves a lot of reinvention.

I first went to India because of my interest in yoga, hoping to go to the Iyengar Centre in Pune for a while. That didn't work out, but I ended up on a beach in Goa, writing.

Most writers battle with periods of being blocked; it's almost an occupational hazard. But in the writing of his last and greatest novel, 'A Passage to India,' E. M. Forster got stuck for nine years.