A writer’s world | Achal Mishra’s portrait of Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla

Back in 2022, when actor Manav Kaul asked Achal Mishra to tag along for his meeting with renowned author Vinod Kumar Shukla at his home in Raipur, he knew a film could come out of it. “I went over-prepared,” Mishra tells india today. The filmmaker carried two cameras, tripods and an entire lot of sound-recording equipment. But fate had other plans. For a significant portion of the day, he found himself unable to shoot anything as he turned into a starstruck fan whenever Shukla, the 2024 Jnanpith award winner and now 88, started speaking. “I ended up just listening,” he says. Mishra couldn’t believe his luck—that he was in the same room as one of Hindi’s greatest living writers and, incidentally, also the only Indian recipient of the PEN/ Nabokov Award for International Literature.