In Conversation with Mitzi Rapkin on the First Draft Podcast

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

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In this episode, Mitzi talks to Megha Majumdar about her new novel, A Guardian and a Thief.

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From the episode:

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Mitzi Rapkin: I feel as someone who didn’t grow up in India, based on what we’ve been fed in America, my understanding of Kolkata is that it is almost like a mythic place. I feel like it’s a place of great love and great poverty and great floods and large amounts of people and it feels almost unreal.

Megha Majumdar: You know what, what comes to mind for me when you say that is, I’m sure there’s a certain way in which a place like Kolkata is represented or was represented in the past and one of the things I really wanted to do in this book was show how funny people are there, which is perhaps something that is less represented as you’re indicating. People in Kolkata live with the daily facts of many different kinds of problems and they are often living within systems that do not serve them but in these circumstances what I find so remarkable is that people laugh about it. And one thing I was very interested in this book is what mode of living does laughter allow? How does it allow us to look at problems candidly? How does it allow us to not be overwhelmed by problems? How does it allow us to retain power in situations where we might feel that our power is very limited? So, what do the jokes of these people in the face of a huge crisis mean?

Mitzi Rapkin: Did you figure that out for yourself? Did writing you help you understand the answer?

Megha Majumdar: I don’t know that writing has ever helped me figure out any of these answers but what writing does do for me is allow me to ask the kind of question that matters to me and there is something so joyful and meaningful in the asking of a question, you know, in the making of room in your life to sit with what matters to you even if those questions are difficult or challenging or sorrowful. I think that there is something inherently joyful in being able to ask those questions.

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**Megha Majumdar **is the author of the novel A Guardian and a Thief, which is Oprah’s Book Club selection for October 2025. The novel is a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize and has been longlisted for the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal. Her first book, the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning, was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal.

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