Literary Birthday – 24 April – Karan Mahajan

Happy Birthday, Karan Mahajan, born on 24 April 1984.

Karan Mahajan Quotes

1. When things are good, you can see no other way of living; when things are in ruins, there appear a million solutions for how this fate could have been avoided.
2. I tend to see my characters from inside and outside at once; this is a technique I use to retain a slight distance. It means my characters can act in unexpected ways on two axes: physical and mental. It isn’t just, ‘I thought this and then I did this,’ which is the technique of the modern psychological novel. (via)
3. Terrorists have goals beyond their supposed pacts with God. They are authors, too. (via)
4. Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus’ worth of lyrics, and so there’s a real pleasure in accessing the intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn’t qualify as ‘great literature’. (via)
5. When I had worked on my first book, I had readily shown bits and pieces to everyone – for encouragement, to force myself to write.
6. Terror is a form of urban planning.

Karan Mahajan is an Indian-American novelist, essayist, and critic. His first novel, Family Planning, was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. His third novel, The Complex, was published in 2026. A selection of his writing for magazines is available here: Writing. A former fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, he is an associate professor in Literary Arts at Brown University.

Source for image: author’s website

by Amanda Patterson

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