Photograph: Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images It is deeply faithful: “Researching this book was one of the ways in which I tried repeatedly to escape the task of actually writing it.” Yet it also shows Kandasamy’s originality the terrible story is framed by a humorous narrator who talks directly to us: “Now the nail-biting reader can join the nervous author in elaborating the rest of the story.”Ĭhennai, India, where Kandasamy was born. The workers, striking for better pay and conditions, were locked in a hut and burned alive. Her first novel, The Gypsy Goddess, was published in 2014 and is a stunning account of the murder of 44 low-caste labourers and their families in a Tamil village in 1968. Following the end of the marriage that inspired When I Hit You, she met her current partner in 2013 and came to the UK in 2016, where she still lives.

She offloaded her anger at India’s “very rigid caste system, which doesn’t give acknowledgement to anyone except the Brahmin population, and even women are excluded from that” by writing poetry, publishing two collections – Touch and Ms Militancy – in her 20s. Kandasamy was born in 1984 in Chennai, India, the daughter of a mixed-caste Tamil marriage. Her social media audience – around 100,000 followers on Twitter – is “more political than literati”. Like her other books, it was driven by a desire for social justice. It was a representation of her own story, but she anonymised the narrator of When I Hit You to universalise the experience she had learned that being “feminist, outspoken, successful, loud” was no protection against violence.

The officer was really kind and he said to me: ‘You’ve written a novel!’” She laughs.

I had this nine-page complaint, literally everything that had happened to me. In 2011, she was married briefly – four months – to a man who subjected her to physical and psychological violence. It was an “intermingling of political and domestic” that drove Kandasamy to write When I Hit You, which was shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction last year.

Ms militancy by meena kandasamy