India, Dec. 1 -- After winning the Binod Kanoria Award, you wrote an Instagram post saying, "A little girl from a small town on the western coast dreamt of writing, and the rest has been blessings and bonuses." How do you look back at this journey?

I grew up in Karwar, where there is still no book shop selling non-academic books. My parents introduced me to children's magazines and to the panchayat library, and later the district library, and opened new worlds to me. I dreamt of writing like the authors I read. I thought that was impossible. When I was about 11, the Karnataka tourism department advertised Karwar as the place on whose beaches young Rabindranath Tagore wrote his first play Prakritir Pratisodh. I said to myself, "If Gurudev...