The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar by Indra Das Shipping

Indra Das' new novella, The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar, is in stock and shipping.

To celebrate our first project with Indra, we asked Arley Sorg to interview him about the novella and his career.

Without further ado...

Indra Das (who also writes as Indrapramit Das) is a writer and editor from Kolkata, India. He broke in with the 2010 story “Kolkata Sea” in Flash Fiction Online and went on to publish stories with a number of notable markets, including Apex, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Slate, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, and more. His debut novel, The Devourers, came out in 2015 with Penguin India and in 2016 with Del Rey in the US. His latest is novella The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar.

Sorg: For me, one of the first things that stands out about The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar is the prose. Immediately striking, often quite beautiful, the prose enables the story to delve into introspection, world building, and more, delivering exquisite (and sometimes perfectly subtle) emotionality along with vibrant imagery. Craft-wise, what is your approach for prose, voice, style – do you focus on sentences? Is it developed over drafts? Does it flow naturally, unconsciously; or is your approach something entirely different than these?

Das: I don’t think I ever have a standardised approach to anything craft-wise, but I do tinker a lot with the first line and paragraphs to establish an aesthetic baseline for myself, to make sure the sentences have a shape that I like, a DNA that I can replicate through the rest of the piece. After that, it flows quite naturally. I’ve always been drawn to ornate and poetic prose as a writer, perhaps because I’m a very sensory person, a stimulation seeker.

Please check out The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar page to read the full interview.