• You both seem to be very preoccupied with the sense of loss, a loosening of traditional moorings. What’s the reason for this wistfulness, what’s the world you’re trying to pin down?

Vaage: Well, we’re both country people. I was born in 1952, and a lot has changed since then in Norway. I write about the loss of tradition, and about working-class people, those who don’t do so well. I would say my heart is on the left side, though I think fiction can capture the existential aspect of these situations in a way that a political tract can’t. Just like in India now, economic and cultural transition can be very disruptive. I tend to focus on the painfulness of change — people who don’t adapt go under, and it hurts even for the people who do change, because they are not the same person any more. Every loss is painful.

Wassmo: Yes, I’m very interested in the encounter between self and society. I write about the personal aspect of these changes, how they play out in the intimate sphere. Your family sets the first limits to an individual, but also bestows care. I’m fascinated with the tangle of power and loyalty that marks family relations, and how they conflict with personal feelings. In my short story, The Motif, the girl doesn’t want to go back, she rejects her father but cannot ultimately escape her roots, where she belongs.

• Speaking of this domestic world and the vulnerable self, many of your central characters seem to be women negotiating their own limits. Is that deliberate?

Wassmo: No, I think that sense of oppression is shared by men as much as women. Men suffer, being put in a box that says ‘this is how a man should be’. It is not politically correct to talk of these repressions. To talk of homosexuality, to talk of the way men exercise power over their own gender in a terrible way. Women can at least hide, retreat into the private space. Men have to go out into the world and still find a way to hide.

• Tell me about the process of writing. In what particular ways do you immerse yourself in the world to write a novel?

Wassmo: Well, I think travel is very important, it’s an expanding experience. Coming to India, so different from Norway, I felt the smallness of my own voice. I find bits and pieces of my stories as I go along. On this very visit, I took elaborate notes in Agra, but lost the notebook. I think it was a lesson for me, to remember the things that really mattered, to absorb experience fully.

Vaage: I really enjoy trying on different lives. In two novels, I have written about a pianist. You don’t need experience to take on anything, you can imagine situations, lives. Writing a novel is really the triumph of the dilettante.

• You’re both poets as well. How does this reflect in your fiction?

Wassmo: Language means a lot to me. I take three years to write a novel and then spend 8-9 months editing it, polishing the language. I need it to become like music, have a rhythm. And dialogue is crucial, getting the sound of conversation to be pitch-perfect.

Vaage: I also pay a lot of attention to the rhythm, speed, and sound. Like with Cows where I used short sentences and steady rhythms to bring it close to music. The language must be beautiful.

• If writing is ‘a raid on the inarticulate’, then translating that, rearticulating, seems almost as daunting in a different way. How do you feel about the act of translation, since you, Mr Vaage, have been on both sides of it?

Vaage: I have translated several American poets, and for me, it’s a great way of reading, and a great challenge. I myself have been translated into English, Russian, German, and now Hindi. In fact, I was once advised to avoid one of my own readings in one of these countries, because the translation was very bad!

Wassmo: I’m very alert to language, to poetry. And it’s very important to me that the translator is also a writer, and someone who is attuned to the world I’m describing. But I can’t overstate how important it is to have these projects, this glimpse into other cultures and traditions so that we can have a real dialogue. Literature is really about human sympathy. It’s about what binds us together, about our shared humanity.