Interview with Ira Mathur
We spoke to journalist and writer Ira Mathur about literature and her career ahead of Amanda Smyth's 'Fortune' launch.
What three words best describe you?
Bookish, Curious, Mercurial.
Tell us how you got into what you do?
My father came to my graduation ceremony at Trent University in Canada expecting me to get the queue business degree, but I went up for the liberal arts degree in philosophy, literature, and history. I switched without telling my parents. He railed on the journey home, saying I couldn’t get a job with philosophy. He wanted me to have a profession. He knew, being a man himself that men were bastards, and it was more important for me to be self-reliant than it was for my brother. Back in Tobago, I happily settled in working as a clerk in the ministry of culture, opposite the sea and full of books.
But after I broke my ankle on the stairs of our house, he announced I was to get my Master’s in Journalism at City University in London. I railed, but he took me with a cast on my leg to London and stayed a month till it came off. In that International Journalism class attended by journalists from everywhere, the world burst open, and I saw the responsibility of the fourth estate in a world that was daily punctured by war, injustice and famine. It also fed my love for language.
What do you most enjoy about being a writer and journalist?
I've been doing this for 25 years, and I still feel a thrill at every interview - be it a man in a shack whose brothers are dead from gang warfare or covering an event with a Nobel laureate or sitting in a room with children with HIV/AIDS. People open their hearts and minds to journalists with the trust that their voices will be heard, silenced or obscure or helpless against injustice. I would like to think journalism allows us to shine the light on neglected, dark, sad corners of the world, giving people who are somehow powerless a voice.
Tell us about a creative masterpiece you wish you'd written
That would be Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things. I grew up in South India, and she somehow reaches into the kernel of things so close to us that we don't even name them. Roy names loss that hides in quiet things, like socks, books, food, violin cases, sores of shins. The themes are universal pain, loss, abuse and love, and beautifully particular to a place and time. But that it's done with such exquisite language that it makes you want to put the book down and just think of a sentence. It lingers for years, hangs around your psyche until it becomes part of you. That's what makes it a masterpiece. I feel the same about VS Naipaul s book Guerrillas, which I think is the best novel of all time, and Derek Walcott’s final collection of poems, White Egrets.
Tell us about an upcoming project that excites you
Peepal Tree Press is publishing a memoir I've been working for a long-time in July 2022. It's a personal story wedged into a weekend with the late Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott in St Lucia. It's my love story to Trinidad, and India where I was born and grew up as a child. A novel I wrote during lockdown was long-listed in the final 31 from 2058 novels submitted globally for the Bath Novel Award, and I'm looking forward to seeing where that will land.