Guest Author Interview - Kevan Dinn

The guest author interview feature is proving quite popular and I'm growing a backlog of interviews, so I'm increasing the frequency to two interviews per week. We'll have to see if we can maintain the tempo as time progresses, but I have plenty for at least a month.

This week we welcome Kevan Dinn to the hotseat:

Please introduce yourself, who are you and what do you do?
After three decades of hectic corporate life in India and other emerging economies, I wanted do something different and personally more satisfying in terms of creativity. I therefore quit my fulltime career as a management consultant and decided to split my time between advising corporate, teaching and writing.

Tired of extensive physical travel around the world for the better part of three decades, I now prefer less punishing mental excursions into fictional worlds of my own creation.

I write epic fantasy and Indian corporate crime fiction. I live in Chennai, India.

What inspired you to start writing?
My kids (both boys) are fans of the LOTR and Star Wars universes, and wanted a new fantasy world of our own. I decided to take a shot at it in 2010, and ended up creating Pangaea and a multi-volume epic fantasy series set in it.

If you could write anyone's biography, who's would it be?
Perhaps Albert Einstein or Tolkien. Both are masters of their chosen fields, and would have approached life very differently than most. It would be fascinating to get an insight into their thinking and imagination.

What is the best part about writing for you?
The freedom to create.

That is why I like fantasy best. Contemporary crime fiction is relatively limiting.

And the worst part?
Proof reading!

What is your favourite book? Why?
It is probably a toss-up between Lord of the Rings and Asimov’s Foundation Series. The former explores possibilities unbounded by science and reality, while the latter explores science unbounded by time. And, of course, both are very powerful epics.

What are you working on at the moment? How can we find out more?

Three things:

1. Redoing the second book of the Shinmah Series to make it sharper. An outline of the series (as it stands now) is available at http://shinmahs.wordpress.com.
2. Writing my second Indian corporate crime fiction novel.
3. Thinking about my first science fiction novel’s theme, plot & storyline.

I will post updates on Twitter (@KevanDinn) & Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/kevan.dinn)

Thanks to Kevan for sharing his thoughts with us, on Friday we'll be interviewing Laurie Brown.