Conferences, fact and fiction - from Harini Nagendra

Bouchercon and Killer Nashville 2024 have ended recently. Your thoughts on your conference experience. Do you get post conference blues, or does it energize you? 

Before I begin, let me confess - I haven't been to a single writer's conference in the US so far! Sadly, the expense of taking two long flights to attend one short conference creates barriers. I felt this most keenly in 2022, when my debut fiction book, The Bangalore Detectives Club, was nominated for a Lefty, Agatha and Anthony best debut award in the US, and for the CRA Historical dagger in the UK - and I couldn't make it for a single one of these, especially missing the panels where all the other debut authors were in conversation about their books. 

That was definitely a bittersweet moment - or set of moments. In balance though, the sweet far out-weighed the bitter, given that I had never expected the book to receive all these wonderful nominations.

But then, in 2023, I was invited to Motive, the Toronto International Literature Festival's crime and mystery edition, as a speaker - and what a blast I had. Here I am, on the Toronto harbor front, posing in front of a ginormous sign that announced my name to the city - in the company of a stellar set of authors. I hung out with other authors like Vaseem Khan, met a bunch of wonderful readers, went out to dinner with a lovely group of South Asian writers, including Ausma Zehanat Khan and her friends - with whom I am now friends-for-life. Vaseem and I had to rush from our rooms in the conference hotel in the middle of the night, and stand on the street with others for a long while because a fire alarm misfired - that was certainly an unforgettable experience. More grist for the writer's mill! 

I've been to many academic conferences in the US and other parts of the world for the past 30 years of course, but I was struck by the marked difference between academic conferences and writers' conferences - fiction is clearly more fun than fact! I hope to make it to Bouchercon, Left Coast Crime, Killer Nashville or one of the other big mystery writer conferences in the US sometime soon. 

Meanwhile - in news to come - it seems I may be able to make it to a writer's conference in the US later this year! I just got an email today, and hope to be able to share the news soon. I'm looking forward to meeting many authors I know via email, and to meeting readers too - fingers crossed!