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Life, loss, and love: how author Elizabeth Gilbert dances around the great mysteries of the universe YSW: How did your growing up years influence you as a writer? PM: It is real life that gives one the raw material for fiction, isn’t it? The novel has both factual and fictional elements. Is it, in any way, inspired by real life? YSW: The story talks about a complicated father-son relationship. I’ve made it malleable enough for the reader to play with it. The final story is something that lends itself to addition and subtraction - you can embellish it or pare it down. When I started building the novel in my head, I decided I would give myself complete freedom, and that’s how I wrote. Perhaps the seed for this novel came from my observations of modern life and the problems of my contemporaries, and friends of my own age. The origin of a book is quite like the origin of a river. Perumal Murugan (PM): It is hard to articulate where the seed of any creative work comes from, how it falls, how it grows and blossoms. How did the story come about and what was the thought process like? Image credit: By Sreejithkoiloth - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, YSWeekender (YSW): Tell us about this year’s release Estuary. Nandini Krishnan, the translator of the book tells us about the nuances in translation and working with Murugan on the book. In a conversation with YS Weekender, Perumal Murugan talks about Estuary, his influences and creative freedom. This year, the author’s Estuary, translated from Tamil by author-translator Nandini Krishnan depicts a complicated relationship between a father and a son in an urban narrative, exploring both ambiguities and interruptions in a tale of isolation. The world had not lost the brilliance and the stark reality of his writing, yet. However, after the Madras High Court ruled in his favour, Murugan returned to his literary career with a collection of poetry. As he says, “One can’t talk about caste one can’t talk about religion one can’t talk about traditions and social mores.” One must understand the extraordinary circumstances that forced a brilliant and outstanding writer like Murugan to take a step like this. An ordinary teacher, he will live as P Murugan. As he is not God, he is not going to resurrect himself, he also has no faith in rebirth. He wrote on his Facebook page, “Perumal Murugan, the writer is dead. In 2015, after protests against his book, Madhurobagan (translated as One Part Woman in English) erupted, popular Tamil author, Perumal Murugan announced he was giving up writing.