Author Interview - Ammar Kalia

Teenage-poet turned tearjerking novelist Ammar Kalia tells shares his inspiration, tips and how he combined freelancing with writing A Person Is A Prayer. Enjoy!

Ammar, tell us about your writing journey?

I started writing poetry from the age of about seven. I’m not sure where I got the idea from because my family barely read and I wasn’t an avid reader as a kid either, but I do remember getting an immense sense of satisfaction from filling a page with words. The poems continued and morphed (embarrassingly) into song lyrics when I was a teen. Around the same time I also began writing amateur reviews for a music blog. I studied English at university and built a career writing for The Guardian and working as a freelance arts journalist and commercial writer for agencies including TYPE! founders’ Inquisitive Type. Poems ebbed and flowed alongside my non-fiction writing until 2020 when I decided to release a collection of poems and an accompanying album of drumming, Kintsugi: Jazz Poems for Musicians Alive and Dead. I had an idea for a novel rattling around my head for a few years and by 2019 I began work on it, ultimately finishing it in 2021. It’s called A Person Is A Prayer and it is out on 30 May.

Tell us about your publishing journey?

As soon as I finished the manuscript, I spent a few months editing it and then sent it out to a few agents. They either didn’t get back to me or rejected it on the various grounds of it needing more work, a clearer hook, or the fact that it just didn’t quite grab them enough. That knocked the wind out of my sails and I spent the next year or so veering between altering the manuscript, sending it to other agents and entering it into prizes. At the end of 2022 the book was shortlisted for Unbound Firsts, and that prompted another round of agent submissions, which is when I landed with the agent I have now, Seren Adams. She’s a great believer in the book and an incisive editor. Together we honed its themes and then I came up with a new framing device for the beginning and end. We sent it out for submission and got an enthusiastic response from Oldcastle Books, which signed it in 2023.

What are you good at?

I’m pretty good at feeling into characters’ minds and emotions, the things that make them tick or ways that they might respond in different situations. I feel like writing is essentially making characters up in your head and then devising situations where they make each other cry – I can get to the crying bit alright! I’m still learning though and I think it’s important to always be questioning your process and style. I’m interested in the rhythm and pace of storytelling, mainly trying to work out how little I can get away with telling readers before they become frustrated.

What inspires your writing?

So many authors are inspiring to me for different reasons – I love Alan Hollinghurst’s rich knowledge and confident style, Ali Smith’s playfulness, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s arrogance, Samanta Schewblin’s weirdness, Sunjeev Sahota’s empathy, Ben Lerner’s form, the list goes on. I’m also hugely into music and I find that certain artists can really get me into characters’ mindsets. For instance, I’m deep into writing a new book and listening to the pianist Kelly Moran’s work has been great for embodying a certain character’s sadness, while Shinichi Atobe has been really good for pacing out to his thumping club rhythm. I’m also just inspired by people in general, witnessing our quirks, resilience and the strange things we do. The other day I saw a guy eating a banana in the rain – poetry!

How did you find the transition from poetry to novel-writing?

Poetry often feels like telling a story and then stripping away everything but the most interesting and evocative words. In some ways, writing A Person Is A Prayer felt like fleshing out a long poem, while trying to highlight those moments of elevated emotion and introspection. The hardest part of the transition was pacing, since the poetry I write is short form. I needed to constantly keep in mind how to keep readers engaged from one page to the next, while also maintaining an overall narrative arc and rhythm for each character.

How did you pitch A Person Is A Prayer to agents?

A Person Is A Prayer tells the story of the Bedi family, who migrate from India to Kenya to England. It’s set on three individual days in 1955, 1994 and 2019, with each providing snapshots into different generations of the family’s life and how they continue to grapple with their identity and sense of belonging. The final day in 2019 is told from the first-person perspective of the three siblings who have travelled to India to spread their father’s ashes in the Ganges. I initially pitched it as an “imagined memoir” – an attempt to plug the gaps of my own family’s history and their migration, but it got a bit too complicated unpicking the strands between fact and fiction and justifying the autofiction tag without my work being overtly experimental. Instead, I pitched it as a straightforward novel, inspired by real events, that works through themes of longing, family histories, and home.

Who do you think your audience is?

I’d like to think my work speaks to the Asian diaspora and anyone with an experience of migration in their family history, since I’m always interested in probing the tensions between an idealised past and imagined future. Industry people would call it “literary fiction”, so I guess anyone who’s into that should hopefully be my audience too! But really, the greatest privilege as a writer is the possibility that your work will speak to all sorts of people, so I hope there’s something everyone can find interesting in there.

What’s it like having two writers in the house?

Terrible! Just kidding, it’s wonderful and I think it would be very hard living with a writer if you didn’t have an understanding of our (often antisocial and infuriating) processes. Practically, living with my partner Sophia Chetin-Leuner, who is a fantastically talented playwright and screenwriter, means a lot of us both sitting at the kitchen table, huffing, typing and staring into space, and then distracting each other with lunch options. Creatively, it’s made me a much better writer, since we both encourage each other to take time out of our day jobs to write and when we share our work it sets an informal deadline to get the writing done. Sophia is a thorough and excellent note-giver, while I just say her writing is great and have little else constructive to add! Having us both cheerlead for each other feels important in an industry that can be painfully slow and full of rejection. Sophia just had a play on at the Bush Theatre in London, This Might Not Be It, and people should get their hands on the playtext, it’s amazing.

What are your top tips for writing?

Approach writing like a muscle that needs constant flexing, movement and strengthening. I know a lot of musicians who try to make something new every day, even if it means playing a four-note melody at the keyboard, since it gets you into the habit of tapping into your creativity. Try to write as often as you can, even if it’s just one sentence, since the more you can write, the better you will ultimately become. All you can do is meet yourself at your desk and then see what happens from there. More practically, unless you are the recipient of fantastic family wealth, you will need to work outside of writing and that will frame creative work as a luxury. It’s a tough reality and I think it’s important to admit that and be kind to yourself. Try to write as often as you can but if you don’t get your manuscript done by the end of the year like you swore to yourself that you would, that’s ok. Try to find that balance between work, rest and play (creativity), since if you’re not in a good place it’s likely your writing won’t be either.

How has review writing helped your fiction?

I write a lot of reviews of wordless, abstract or experimental music and I love it because working out ways to describe the texture of a sound and how it might make you feel is a creative act in itself. In that sense, writing reviews is great for my fiction, as it helps me feel into the ways that we can worldbuild through sound, feeling and sense. It can also be awful because to write a review is to be constantly critical and on the lookout for inconsistency and contradiction. That means I can be overly critical of my creative writing, to the point where I won’t set anything down on the page for ages because I’m too busy playing out all the permutations in my head. It’s a side of criticism I’m actively moving away from by trying to only review work that I’d like to champion positively and spotlight, rather than take down.  

How do you balance commercial writing with dramatic writing?

I find commercial writing can be helpful when it comes to fiction. Commercial clients are often exacting, even if they don’t exactly know what they want, and that means you must get good at working through several rounds of edits to make the words work in the way your client wants them to. It’s a fascinating exercise and one that’s very helpful when it comes to having your own manuscript edited. The downside is that if I do too much commercial writing, I can find it hard to tap into my own voice and style when it comes back to creative work. It’s a balancing act.  

What’s next?

I’m working on a second novel and despite telling myself the manuscript would be done by the beginning of this year, I’m now pushing that back to the end of this year – watch this space… Hopefully the new book can find a publishing home and otherwise I’m trying to savour the release of A Person Is A Prayer and keep that constant juggling act going of work, play and rest. I’m also a drummer and trying to play much more music this year, so if anyone has a jazz outfit they need percussion for – let me know!

++ Visit Ammar’s website here, or discuss this article and A Person Is A Prayer on Twitter @Ammar_Kalia or Instagram @kendrick_ammar_1.