New York Times bestselling author Megha Majumdar visited Rollins College to share insights on her latest novel, "A Guardian and a Thief." During a talk on February 19, she emphasized the importance of embracing failure in writing. The event highlighted themes from her book and her creative process.
Megha Majumdar, author of the New York Times bestseller "A Burning," spoke at Rollins College on February 19 about her second novel, "A Guardian and a Thief." The book, published on October 14, 2025, has been recognized as a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction and the Kirkus Prize, and it was selected for Oprah’s Book Club.
Set in a near-future, climate-ravaged Kolkata facing flooding, famine, and food scarcity, the novel centers on Ma, a mother who secures visas for herself, her elderly father, and young daughter to escape to the United States. Their plans unravel when their passports and documents are stolen days before departure. The story unfolds over one intense week, alternating between Ma's desperate search for recovery and the viewpoint of Boomba, the young thief driven by his own family's needs. Majumdar's narrative explores how extreme hardship blurs moral lines and underscores devotion to loved ones, even amid painful choices.
In conversation with Professor Victoria Brown, an associate professor of English at Rollins, Majumdar reflected on her writing journey. She noted that the novel took six years to complete, involving numerous drafts. "The most important thing about writing is accepting that you will fail most of the time," she said. Another quote from the discussion: "I wrote this book for six years, and I wrote failed pages and horrible pages. But I’m so glad that I had all of those failed directions because they brought me to this iteration of the book."
Majumdar drew from her experiences with motherhood and her ties to Kolkata to shape the story, focusing on privilege and inequality. The talk encouraged aspiring writers to view writing as a process of discovery through uncertainty and persistence, extending the novel's themes of love, morality, and survival into the act of creation itself.