Andrew O’Hagan is one of the very few literary figures who is surprisingly extremely active on Instagram. “I love Instagram. I love it. It’s one of my hobbies now because it’s a wonderful way of keeping in touch with your readers all around the world. It’s such a sweet, innocent and uncomplicated relationship,” said the Scottish novelist in a delightful tone after finishing one of his sessions at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2025. “People don’t argue on Instagram. I’m not on Twitter. I’m not on Facebook. I’m not interested in Mark Zuckerberg’s universe of uncheckable facts. I’m interested in human connection. I keep in touch with journalists and film producers, and readers around the world via Instagram,” explains O’Hagan informing that he is too busy to be doom-scrolling on the app.
O’Hagan has been nominated thrice for the Booker Prize — Our Fathers (1999), Be Near Me (2006), and The Illuminations (2015). His books have won many awards, including the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize (Our Fathers), James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction (Personality in 2003), Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (Be Near Me), and Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award (The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe in 2010) and many more. O’Hagan’s pen extends beyond the pages of a book and has reached the screen and stage as well. He wrote a three-part film for the BBC, The World According to Robert Burns. His novel Mayflies was adapted by BBC One for a two-part TV drama in 2020. Currently, he is travelling the world with his last two books — Caledonian Road and Mayflies. We got an opportunity to sit down for a chat with O’Hagan at the Jaipur Lititerature Festival 2025. Excerpts.
In one of your Instagram posts you said the best part of the author’s business is meeting new readers. How has it been so far? And, in another post you said Jaipur has the best audience in the world...
It’s absolutely astonishing here in Jaipur to meet with dozens and dozens of young readers. And not only young, different ages, but I’m especially struck by young readers, whole parties of young people from school coming to have their copies of Mayflies signed, to talk about Caledonian Road, and my career as a writer. Many of them want to be writers themselves, and many others just want to be better readers. And here in Jaipur, it’s a kind of an explosion of richness in that way. As an author of 10 books, I’ve been whispering into the ears of my imagined readers for a long time. But then to hear back from them is a wonderful experience. They have voices, too. They have lives and experience and memories and ambitions. And it’s wonderful to hear their voices. I don’t know what it is about the culture here, but people are not shy of coming up to you and telling you their story.
Coming to the question on the second post, humanly, emotionally, in terms of its enjoyment of life and its recognition of the complexity and colour of life… I’ve been around the world. I’ve been in Australia, Canada, America, Germany, Spain, France… wonderful countries all full of lively human beings, but Jaipur takes second place to none of these places. The richness is striking every day, striking to the heart and the mind. I could stay here for months. I love it. The high and the low of life seem available to the imagination of young people here, and they want to talk about expression, they want to talk about the imagination as if, you know, their lives depended on it.
Let me tell you something, this is counterintuitive. The great cliche about modern life is, oh, young people are addicted to their phones, their attention span is only five seconds, they don’t want to read etc. This is nonsense. I’ve been in this business for 32 years, I’ve been a professional writer since I was a young man of 21, and what I see now is that I’m getting more sales, more readers. My last two books have sold more than any books of mine and a lot of these readers are young. So it’s nonsense that we are in a dark age for reading, that nobody can watch anything longer than a 10-second video. This is nonsense.
An interesting connection that I found out about you is that you were the UNICEF ambassador for literature for many years and you worked in Calcutta. In fact, in 2004 you edited The Weekenders.
Yes. Well, this was an attempt to raise awareness about child exploitation in India, in Calcutta at that time. There were many young people around Howrah Station and elsewhere who were being brought into child prostitution. Poverty was driving them into dark places in life, and during those years, UNICEF had a campaign to try to change that and introduce relief.
As an ambassador, one of my ideas was to create a book of short stories written by writers who visited Calcutta, to write about different aspects of Calcutta life. Some very prominent writers were brought here to India, and they wrote great stories. And I edited the book, put them together, and we had a great success with that book. People like Alex Garland, and Irvine Welsh who wrote Trainspotting, were part of it. We did make money but we also raised awareness for children in India. That was the intention.
Your novels have an uncanny connection. Whether it’s Our Father, Be Near Me, or The Illuminations, each novel talks about a kind of change, a transition through war or a changing political system. So, tell me about your process of weaving this element into your narratives.
It’s a lovely question. I think that the novel is a little moral machine. And the petroleum, the gas that drives that machine, is the notion of progress, the notion of change. Every book I’ve ever written has had at its centre a crack-up or a change or a small revolution in life. Every family knows of these changes, knows of a revolution that occurs. Sometimes it’s very quiet. It’s a marriage that was unexpected, or it’s a child that arrives. Or it’s a relationship that changes, or a financial occurrence. I’ve always tried to write about the way society brings about change, individuals bring about change. And it’s sometimes difficult and dramatic but very engaging to read about. So I think it will always be the thing that my books have in common. It’s an obsession with the drama of change.
The latest one, Caledonian Road, talks about Covid and Brexit...
Oh yes, it’s about all those changes at once. The reason it’s such a big book is because it offers a portrait of modern London. An exciting, entertaining, sometimes dark portrait of corruption in modern London, which shows you how much change there has been since Brexit, since the pandemic, since the migrant crisis, since our social services have been under pressure. People who are interested in a major world city, such as London, I always understood that they would want a book like this. A Dickensian novel. A social novel which would give you all the different types who live in such a city within the same covers. And how they all relate to each other — the politicians and the commercial world, the business people, the media people, the film people, the fashion people, the street seller, the man who grows oranges — we all are related because we all are deeply connected at base. We’re breathing the same air, we’re living in similar circumstances even if on the surface we seem miles apart.
The character Campbell Flynn in the book, he’s a writer, a bestseller writer, based out of London, and living at the time you live. Where does the similarity end with you?
Well, he was very close to me initially because I wanted a writer who was from Scotland, lived in London for a few decades, who was in his early 50s, and was well known as a pundit and someone who speaks on TV programmes and so on. So that was quite like me up to that point. But then something else emerged in my planning of the book, which was that this man was in crisis. Within his internal system, his own moral life was in danger. He was being corrupted by associations which he couldn’t understand. He had friendships and family relationships which were causing him great pain. And this was not like me. So that’s what happens in novels. You can start from something very familiar and then you graft onto the top of that a new Frankenstein’s monster, something new. So I was surprised to see that this man became less and less like me as we moved on. His crisis was not my crisis. His drama was not my drama.
As soon as you publish a novel, it becomes a bestseller. It gets long-listed or short-listed for some awards or something. And then again, some of the novels quickly get adapted into TV series. When you write, are these things playing on your mind?
They never play in my head while I’m working on a book. I have never quite honestly thought about adaptation. You don’t know what the project is going to be in the end. Even with very detailed planning, it almost feels like bad karma to think about the afterlife of the book. I barely think about readers or prizes or adaptations because I’m so busy trying to solve the problems of this sentence, this paragraph, this page and this story. And I’m dedicated to solving those problems and writing the best book I can. I really don’t expect any rewards or success of that sort. I hope for it, but I don’t think about it. So when it comes, it’s a great surprise and a great honour. And adaptations, particularly, are amazing because suddenly the book gets to have a second life. Mayflies became a BBC show. I really, truly believed in what they did, I thought they did a marvellous job.
There is the possibility of Caledonian Road becoming a big series for television internationally and it’s great news for the book. But again, a huge surprise. If it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have been weeping. You’ve got to be philosophical to survive this business. You’ve got to be even-tempered. If you get too invested in success that might happen, then you go crazy.
Pictures: Andrew O’Hagan’s Instagram