India, Nov. 29 -- 1Congratulations on the success of One Day... The title feels both prophetic and resigned. How did you arrive at it? I never really used to post online - I feel short form is not my strong suit - but in late October 2023, I posted this tweet that I didn't think was particularly profound. It was just this notion that, with respect to the slaughter in Gaza, one day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this. I am not a very "smart" person, but I was thinking in terms of pattern recognition. I was thinking of a particular kind of mainstream liberal. I was thinking about how you won't find anyone who will tell you they used to be in favour of segregation (in the US) or apartheid (in South Africa). Originally, it wasn't going to be the title of this book. The title was going to be The Glass Coffin. It was after the first draft was completed that one of my editors said, you should repurpose what you said in the tweet. That's how the title came to be. 2Do you think about hope, in writing, not as an antidote to despair, but perhaps as a kind of defiance? I try to think of hope as a prologue. I have no interest in hope as an epilogue. Hope as a starting point to actually do something to address issues is something I am more connected to. That's the distinction I try to make. My starting point, purely as a function of survival, has to be hope. 3You've said before that you are less interested in writing about politics than in writing about the people politics happens to. Could you elaborate? I often say that if my writing is political, which obviously I think it is, it's not because I have taken a deliberate step to approach the political. It's because the political has deliberately approached me. I am an Arab Muslim named Omar living in the United States. Much of my existence is political, and I have no choice in the matter. So, naturally, when I come to write, I can't jettison that. I also think that all literature is political. It's either political by virtue of its active space, what you're engaging with, or its negative space, what you're choosing to ignore. I wish I had the privilege to write about how beautiful the sky is all the time, and to write from a position that thinks of the political as a sullying thing - you know, this doesn't belong in real literature. I wish I had that, but I don't. 4Which books have influenced you? My favourite book-length piece of non-fiction is A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan. Then there's Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. Before reading it, I thought a writer could say something urgent, write in a fundamentally new way, or create beautiful sentences, but couldn't do all three. After reading it, I realised you can do all three. Then, The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most photorealistic collections of books I've read. I could do this for hours, so I'm going to stop and give you a break....