India, April 11 -- Tussling with a new book about the failure of the nation-state, British writer Rana Dasgupta, 53, was feeling like anything but a winner, when he got the call telling him that he had in fact won the 2025 Windham-Campbell prize for non-fiction.

"It was a complete surprise," he says. Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi (2014) was released 11 years ago. This acknowledgement of his body of work came at just the right time, though, he says. A time when he was wrestling with whether there was anything human left about the very act of writing, in an age of artificial intelligence.

Humanity is certainly woven into all his work. Dasgupta's first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), is a modern-day take on Canterbury Ta...