Column | Kanishka Gupta’s open door policy

Kanishka Gupta's open door policy as a literary agent leads to success with award-winning authors and international recognition.

Kanishka Gupta, 43, is likely the most popular book agent in the country right now. One strategy that has helped him go from being an outsider who “didn’t know the ABC of agenting” — and someone whom publishers fobbed off by saying they didn’t pay author advances — to an industry insider who runs the largest literary agency in South Asia, is that he always keeps his doors open.

“I don’t say, tune mujhe kitab nahi di, katti (You didn’t give me your book, so I won’t speak to you),” he says. He once helped a journalist-author conduct an auction for her book despite the fact that she didn’t want him to be her agent. In turn, she introduced him to many writers. In an insulated and competitive field, Gupta’s open door policy is rare.

Now he’s the agent for feminist lawyer Indira Jaising’s conversational biography with Ritu Menon; says he can tell if ChatGPT is the real author of a piece of writing by the overuse of words such as ‘tapestry’ and ‘align’; and promises to send me an award-winning book published in 2019 that he’s re-pitching for publication in the U.K. and the U.S. because he has “never read a book like this”. He’s talking about Numair Atif Choudhury’s Babu Bangladesh!. Choudhury died in a freak drowning accident in Japan a year before his book was released.

He may not yet have discovered an Arundhati Roy in his slush pile, like literary agent David Godwin once did, but Gupta now has an author roster that includes two International Booker winners in four years. He is the agent for Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp (translated by Deepa Bhasthi), which recently bested around 150 entries to win the prestigious prize. He was also translator Daisy Rockwell’s agent when she and author Geetanjali Shree won the 2022 International Booker for Tomb of Sand.

Gupta was also representing two books of Shehan Karunatilaka when the Sri Lankan writer won the 2022 Booker Prize (Gupta got a shoutout in the victory speech alongside Godwin). His author Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar was shortlisted for the Booker in 2020. Gupta says he’s been the agent for around 1,700-1,800 published books so far.

As Heart Lamp propels bookstore sales across the country, Gupta has been inundated with translation offers. “…Malay, Sinhala, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, Arabic… a Georgian publisher is interested, the Polish book is a big deal,” he rattles off at 2x speed, adding that he has also received invites from 30 literature festivals.

Gupta became an agent “by accident”. In school he had “zero interest” in books. As a teenager, he suffered from “life-threatening depression” and a few years after, he began writing a book. Somehow, due to regular visits to Delhi book shops, he developed an interest in publishing. “I kept observing and Googling,” he says.