Hari Kunzru

 On Friday, over lunch, I heard the news that Salman Rushdie would not be attending the Jaipur Literature Festival. His visit had been in doubt for some time.

'The Maestro is a world-famous man of letters, renowned for his soaring talent and iron discipline. But one afternoon, a lapse in self-control causes him to lose the precious object that lies behind his genius...'

In September 2011 I went to visit Joan Didion at her apartment on the Upper East Side. I was there to interview her for a British women's magazine about Blue Nights, her recently-published memoir. We spoke (among other things) about grief, the aesthetics of failure, California and (at the request of the editor) about her friendship with the Redgrave family.