Hari Kunzru lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the novelist Katie Kitamura, and their two small children. He received a £1.25m advance for his first novel, The Impressionist (2002), while Booker Prize-winning novelist Aravind Adiga recently said: “The book I wish I’d written? Whatever Hari Kunzru is publishing next.”
Life, then, appears to have been relatively kind to Kunzru. So why did he feel the need to delve into the cesspit of the alt-right for his latest novel, Red Pill? “I wanted to write a book about privacy and surveillance initially, then I got a residency in Berlin,” he says. “I was in Wannsee, which is a sleepy suburb. There’s a lake and it’s not the hipster Berlin of Mitte or Kreuzberg. It was the middle of winter, so it was kind of bleak, dead.
“On the other side of the lake, visible from my desk, was the Wannsee Conference house, where they plotted the Final Solution. It became clear I had to set something in Berlin, then it got wrapped up with the alt-right. I’ve been online since 1992 and I’ve always dug around in the subcultures of the internet.”
