How I Write: Rana Dasgupta

Join us from the comfort of your sofa and listen to writers share their work, the stories behind their work, and invaluable writing advice directly from their own desk (or maybe the kitchen table). And the best part? At the end you get to ask them questions about their words, pick their brains on craft, and learn more about the business of writing.

Rana Dasgupta is a British novelist and essayist. Born in Canterbury in 1971, he studied at Balliol College, Oxford and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2001, he moved to New Delhi to write. Tokyo Cancelled, a collection of contemporary folktales, appeared in 2005. A novel, Solo (2009), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 2014 he published Capital, a non-fiction account of the changes engulfing his adopted city as a result of globalization. Capital won the Ryszard Kapuściński Award and the Prix Émile Guimet. Dasgupta’s essays and articles have appeared in Harper’s, Granta, New Statesman, Prospect, The Paris Review, the Guardian and The New York Times. In 2018, he published a manifesto (“The Demise of the Nation-State”, the Guardian, 5 April 2018) for a new conception of human political organization. His next book, After Nations (2024), describes four crises of the contemporary nation-state (“God”, “Money”, “Law”, “Nature”) and presents a path to a fairer and more peaceful global future.

This session will be delivered via Zoom webinar, so you can take the session at your own pace, without the pressure of having your video or camera on. Sessions are also recorded so if you are unable to attend live, you will have access to the recording for a month afterwards.

Online: Pay what you can

Suggested donation £5 or £2.50

We are committed to making our Arvon at Home programme accessible to as many people as possible.

Across all of Arvon at Home

• All sessions will have auto-generated captioning.
• During sessions we will have a text version available via screen share.
• There is a Chat facility to ask any questions.

Masterclasses and Online Writing Day

• A recording of the Masterclass will be available to view for one month after it is aired live.
• There is a Chat and Q & A facility to ask any questions.
• Zoom webinar format (your video and audio will remain off throughout, & your name will not be visible to other participants so it is a ‘relaxed’ event).

How I Write

• There is a chat and Q&A facility to ask any questions.
• Zoom webinar format (your video and audio will remain off throughout, & your name will not be visible to other participants so it is a ‘relaxed’ event).

Online Writing Weeks / Weekends

• Courses have much smaller groups than Masterclasses and How I Write events, and are also more interactive with your fellow course participants and tutors, so cameras and audio are usually on (though both are completely optional). If you would prefer your camera and audio to be off, it would be helpful to let your course host know this in advance.

Subject to funding/permissions (please contact us for more details)

• Recording of Writing Weeks and Weekends.
• Downloadable transcripts.
• BSL interpretation.
• Live captioning.

If you have any access issues that we have not covered here, please contact us on access@arvon.org

See here for more access information.