Bare Bones Publishing is delighted to welcome Dr Sunil Sharma to its Advisory Board. Dr Sharma is a senior academic, author, editor, and critic. He has published 27 creative and critical books––joint and solo. A winner of, among others, the Panorama Golden Book Awards 2023 and the Nissim International Fiction Prize 2022 for the political novel The Minotaur, his poems were included in the prestigious Happiness, the Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, 2015. He is the editor (English) of the bilingual monthly journal, Setu.

We interviewed Dr Sharma for our readers.

What was an early experience where you learnt that language had power?

Whenever some kind soul––teacher, parent, friend, spouse, kid, mystic, or author––says in a soft whisper to a bruised guy lying flat on a hard terrain, “You can do it! Get up and run against the winds!” Magical words uttered at any stage of life or hour. 

And then, the desired miracles start happening, in a strange alchemy of action, grit, and empowering language, language that uplifts.

You ride the dark storms and indeed come out strong and stronger, as suggested by Murakami, ready for other rides.

What’s your favourite under-appreciated book?

The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson.

If you had to do something differently as a child or teenager to become a better writer as an adult, what would you do?

Will do the time travel in order to recover that goggle-eyed child or teen from the mists of time, and retain and cling to that early version, uncorrupted by the later-on cynicism and commercialisation of souls, in post-industrial cultures.

If you were given the power to change one thing in this world, what would it be?

Toxic hatred in its multiple forms.