Olivier Lafont

Olivier Lafont is a French author, screenplay writer and actor living in Paris. His other works include Warrior (shortlisted for the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize), The Kumaon Secret Society: The Rise of the Midnight King (shortlisted for the Neev Book Award 2020), Sweet Revenge, Snowbound and Purgatory: The Gun of God. He has written an Indo-French feature film that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and went on to win seven awards internationally. He has acted in Hollywood and Indian films, including 3 Idiots and Guzaarish. He graduated with degrees in English Literature and in theatre from Colgate University, USA, with academic distinction.

- Swapna Peri

Tell us about Oop & Lila. How did the idea of the adventurous book happen?

‘Oop & Lila’ came together from three different ideas : a bag of 99 wish candies; adventures based on magical snow globes, with each snow globe having different scenes that lead to different magical worlds ; and the desire to have a brother-sister pairing as my main characters. The wish candies and the magical snow globes actually were on my ideas list, an ongoing list where I jot down any idea that comes to me. The idea could be a film or a book, a whole plot or theme, or just bits of dialogue or titles that I like. Over time some ideas come together quite spontaneously and bloom into a story - which is what happened with ‘Oop & Lila’.

I had wanted to explore the brother-sister dynamic in more detail for some time, and it fit with my other two elements perfectly. With these main three elements together all I needed was an epic setting for a snow globe adventure, and the Golden Age of Piracy was perfect for that, with my own personal twist, of course.

How different are the plotsetting and story mapping in Oop & Lila from your previous book ‘Warrior’ as it is based on traces of stories from mythology?