The Conversation March 12, 2026 Writers Jonty Claypole, Sophie Gee and Roanna Gonsalves at the State Library of NSW, Sydney. Joy Lai/State Library of NSW
The long arm of the library has made a writer of me. This long arm, a composite of many libraries, created the conditions through which a shy reader could continue to live in her head.
I was born and raised in India. It is a country of daily wage earners in makeshift dwellings trying to survive alongside the world’s richest individuals ensconced in immovable towers. It is also a country where the practice of circulating knowledge through libraries has a long history.
It ranges from the library at Nalanda University founded in 427CE, over a thousand years before the Bodleian at Oxford, to Radhamani, the “walking library”, who takes books to villagers in rural Kerala. And from nine-year-old Muskan, who started her own library for kids in the slums of Bhopal, to Kavita Saini from Rajasthan, who opened a library for girls not allowed to leave their village.
This tradition of sharing knowledge held in written texts is bound up with aspiration, pleasure and survival.
