Photo credit: Yi Shi
Janika Oza (she/her) is a writer, editor, and educator based in Toronto. Her best-selling debut novel, A History of Burning (2023) won the 2024 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and was a finalist for numerous awards including the Carol Shield’s Prize for Fiction, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications such as BOMB Magazine, The New York Times, The Toronto Star, and The Kenyon Review. Currently, she is the 2025 Writer-in-Residence at University of Toronto Scarborough and teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies.
Janika is the judge of the 2025 Fiction Contest, which is open to submissions until March 22nd, 2025. In honour of Janika graciously joining us as this year’s judge, we’ve decided to release a feature length interview we were lucky enough to conduct with her in November 2023. This interview was originally published in Room 46.4 Fever Dream, and has never been published online!
Before we get into the full interview, we also got in touch with Janika to ask her a few questions about what she’s reading lately, and what she loves about fiction — which you can find at the end of the feature interview. We are so thrilled to be able to share this exemplary interview with this exceptional author with you, in its entirety, here today.
In May 2023, Janika celebrated the release of her debut novel, A History of Burning, which became an instant national bestseller.
An intricately layered tale about keeping secrets, telling truths, and the reverberations of colonialism, violence, and power, A History of Burning is a tale following the many generations of a family across India, Uganda, England, and Canada. The novel opens in Gujarat, India, in 1898, where thirteen-year-old Pirbhai steps into a dhow on the promise of work, only to be taken across the ocean to labour on the East African Railway for the British. Penguin Random House writes that, “with no money or voice but a strong will to survive, he makes an impossible choice that will haunt him for the rest of his days and reverberate across generations.”
In this feature interview, Ruchika Gothoskar and Janika Oza chat about the reality behind fiction, what it means to access oral histories and living archives, and what other writers of colour seeking to tell difficult tales can do to take care of themselves, while remaining true to their stories. This interview, much like Janika’s stunning debut, reminds us of the deep interconnectedness of our lineage, and the subsequent responsibility we have not only to the ones we love, but to ourselves.
ROOM: Let me start by saying a big congrats to you on your incredible debut. In each part of the book, it is stunning to see how the characters survive and reckon with what is happening in their present, and how their lives and choices are inextricably tied to pasts that are and are not theirs to answer to. I would love to just start there: how did this work come about? What did the process of writing a work that transcends so many generations and moves through so much global socio-political change look like?
JANIKA OZA: Thank you for saying all of those very lovely things. The book—I worked on it for six years, but I think the genesis of it came long, long before that. This is based on a series of historical events that live in my own family history, and so it’s something that I had been living with for a long time: there were stories that had floated around in my family that I was curious about, and there was also so much silence. In my family, we didn’t go deep into the history, we didn’t talk deeply about what had happened, so, growing up, I became more and more curious, and more and more unsettled with what I didn’t know. I have also always been writing, that’s how I process the world, how I understand, so I had been working on a different novel for a couple of years totally unrelated to this one, and one day I was working on that novel and I just had this very clear image that came into my mind, and it was of this family, from this novel. And I saw them sitting at this kitchen table, and I knew that they were in Kampala, I knew it was in 1971, I knew Idi Amin’s military coup was happening outside and they were just kind of trying to understand what was going on. It was just so vivid to me that I thought, okay, I have to note this down, but I’ll just put it down and I’ll get back to my other novel, and I ended up planning out the entire book. Which then, of course, over the course of the next six years changed a lot, but the bones of it were there in that first moment.
I think for me, that moment, that little note that I jotted down, held so much more urgency than anything I had written previously. I felt like I needed to put the other thing away and turn to this, turn all my energy to this, and I think that goes back to what I was saying at the start, the curiosity that I had and also the personal connection where this story is one that I think I’ve lived with for a long time. Much longer than it took to write it. So, there was sort of an intuitive knowing there that was really driving me to write about these characters, to get to know them, and to explore them, and at the same time, there is just so much I didn’t know and so much I wanted to know, so writing into that space between what felt intuitive and what felt completely unknown to me was really what carried me through the next many years of working on the book.
ROOM: Wow, that is an amazing conception for this novel. This sort of leads into my next question, but as a South Asian woman and an immigrant myself, I feel that there’s a lot of tension when immigrants try to reconcile what it means to be hurt by the state, and by white supremacy, and by all of these compounding and complex identities and experiences, while also holding the truth that immigrating to what is a “safe” space for us, also means settling on lands stolen from other Indigenous groups and dispossessing other people. I think this is a similar undercurrent, not only in your debut, but in much of your other writing. How have you, or do you, approach untangling and addressing this complexity in your work, and maybe even in your life?
JO: That’s such a good question, and a question I held very strongly at the centre of writing this book. I wanted to write towards that question of, what does it mean to be a migrant community from a colonized place who then settled in another colonized place, what does it mean for us to be seeking refuge on stolen land? South Asians in Uganda were deeply harmed by the state, by the government, by the dictatorship, but also caused a lot of harm. It’s important to me to bear witness to that, and to not flatten those two truths, but to hold them simultaneously within characters, within this family, and within the community. We’re not going to find any way forward without sitting with that discomfort and speaking about it. That’s really the way I approached it in this work, but I think, too, it’s a question that takes on many different forms in this book. The character this book opens with is tricked into indentured servitude and is forced to make these constrained choices that are extremely harmful to the local population and also not entirely his own, so I really kind of wanted to show the complexity of those circumstances and the ways that that kind of changes over the course of generations of family, especially as their status changes, as their stability and privilege shifts in different ways, and ultimately, the ways that each family member is grappling with this question of, how do I take care of my family, how do I take care of my community, and also how do I survive. And I think those are questions that many of us are still asking now.
ROOM: Yeah, absolutely—it’s tough to pull those things apart, and I know that as much as this is a work of fiction, like you said, much of it really isn’t. Because of that, it almost seems like this book was such an archival project—how did doing the research and putting historical context into fiction work for you? Did it end up looking like doing independent research, did it end up involving talking to elders in your community? What was that process like for you?
JO: Yeah, it’s changed over the course of the years, so at the start of working on this book, I attempted to start with just book research, so whatever I could find through journals, through the archives, through newspapers, things like that. But it very quickly became clear to me that there was very little research out there about this community, about this time and place, and to me that was a clear show of the fact that this is a marginalized community that has been under documented and erased, and there’s a specific narrative that is being told about our community that is very much in line with the colonial project. I found that the British newspapers weren’t really the ones talking about what was happening, and of course, they had a stake in a very certain narrative, one where the British were the heroes. According to what I was reading, it was like [the British] swooped in, everything was very orderly, once Idi Amin gave his expulsion order, people lined up in an orderly fashion, had their refugee cards stamped, and were flown to their next destination and given more support. And that narrative didn’t sit well with me. It didn’t feel like it was the whole truth. I realized, okay, well, I want to write this book that is telling our truth, so I have to speak to my family, I have to speak to my community, I have to speak to people who actually experienced some of these things I want to write about, so I started to do that. I approached my family first and they served as these incredible connectors, connecting me to other family, to community, to people across the world. So, for a couple years I was having these long Zoom, and Skype, and WhatsApp calls that were very global and very much connecting all the places our people scattered, which was everywhere, and these calls were very intergenerational as well, so there would be people on the calls who were in their 80s, in their 60s, a few people on the calls who were of my generation who were there to support and facilitate, some descendants of this history like I am. It was just this really incredible, intergenerational exchange, so for me, when it came to writing the book and structuring it, it was always going to be an intergenerational story because that is how the information came to me and it felt so important to honour that exchange in the book and to think about the ways that somebody many generations ago was still grappling with these same questions and uncertainties that we are now.
Something that was so special about it for me was that those calls were very much a collective remembering and a collective sharing, and particularly talking about something very sensitive but also about something that we don’t talk a lot about in my family, and that was something I was hearing from a lot of people, that it was their first time sharing some of these stories and that collective remembering and collective memory and oral history very much sits outside the Western understanding of the archive. So, for me, it was very intentional to include that in the book, to have that kind of collective voice, intergenerational voice, and movement between the generations.
ROOM: As a reader, hearing you say that is amazing because I really did find that this idea of intergenerational stories and how the experiences and decisions of one continue to ripple is something that is also clear in the book: to me, it felt almost like a mapping of ancestral responsibility to the family, and this motif rears its head again and again throughout this work of yours. But like you said, and as we learn through the book, ancestral knowledge is not always beautiful and easy: sometimes it is tough, and shameful, and complicated. Do you think about yourself as a future ancestor, and does that impact how and what you find yourself called to write about, and what you hope to leave behind?
JO: I think that, for me, writing this book required a lot of patience. It took a lot of time, but also, I was hearing and listening to all of these stories that were being shared with me, some of them for the first time ever, and I took that responsibility really seriously. So, I was always kind of holding this thought of who am I fighting for by writing this book? And how do I do justice with that? For me, that always came back to the community, it always came back to my family and my people and my ancestors. In those stories, those things I was holding, some of that was uncomfortable and I had to sit with that discomfort and then really think about what is it that I want to put into this book: what is it that I want to share, and what do I want to just keep close to my heart.
When I think about this beautiful, tender question about being an ancestor, for me, the most special part of getting to write this book was the way that it became an opening in my family, but also in my community, to begin speaking about some of these things: whether they’re experiences, whether they’re memories, whether they’re just feelings that have been buried for so, so long, and allowing a little space to start talking about those things. But as soon as you allow a little space to open up, that space becomes a little bigger, and a little bigger, and a little bigger, and I think that that work didn’t start with me or this book, but I think this work has helped widen that space a little bit more. I just hope that that work continues because that kind of opening and starting to talk about these experiences that live in our families, in our histories, in our bodies, especially as descendants of these painful histories, that is where healing can happen. Especially because I didn’t get to speak to my grandparents, and that is just a loss to bear, being able to turn to these generations and have this exchange, I really think that that is where healing can happen. And, of course, this is long work: it is the ongoing work of many generations, it doesn’t just end. So, most of all, that is my hope as I continue to write and as this book continues to live in the world: that it can continue to serve as an opening.
ROOM: That is a really lovely sentiment. It’s wonderful to be able to think about your craft as a vessel for your loved ones to be able to continue to share these stories and feel unburdened through that sharing. Writing is always a tricky craft to harness in that way, and it seems like this hope you have is one that is dictated by a lot of your life outside of the lit world, where you’ve done some equally incredible things with a Masters Degree in Immigration and Settlement Studies, and lots of work experience with immigrant refugee families. I know that balancing the rigidity of academia while trying to honour your creativity can be tough, especially when the things we do professionally end up being reflections of what we care about most personally. Do you often find yourself trying to achieve the balance of letting work be work and letting art be art, or do you find that rather than segregating those spaces, you let them ebb and flow to inform and impact one another?
JO: I think my mind is going to two places. The biggest separation that has to happen is in terms of literal time: the time to write and carving out the space to be able to do that and that has to exist separately from the standard 9-5. When I was working [9AM to 5PM], that took a lot of maneuvering and there were large stretches of time where I was just not writing, where I would really be feeling like writing, but it was like, oh, I can’t wait for Saturday! But then there’s the part that’s more internal, and the ways that the ideas and experiences in my work are very related to the things I am interested in writing about creatively, I found that, both in my program and in my work as a refugee settlement counsellor, there was often times that I felt this collapsing of those experiences and my writing, and that, for me, felt very generative. It felt enriching to the writing, to also be living and experiencing and supporting and speaking with people who were presently going through these experiences of migration and change.
I would say in my work as a settlement counsellor, a lot of that work really relates to storytelling, at least, that’s how I would understand it. In that role, I was someone who would be doing these intake sessions, and I would be asking clients to tell me their stories in order to try to get them legal aid, so I was very much once again in a position where I was I was listening to and trying to hold these stories and make sense of them. Of course, it was in a very different way from the research in this book, but that work experience made me very attuned to the way that people tell stories, the way that people share memories, the ways that the body changes or the breath changes when feeling activated, the way that people use humour or deflection, or sometimes just stop talking altogether, you know, there’s just such nuance in the ways we speak about what has happened to us and so much of that filtered into this book that I was writing concurrently throughout that whole time, which is, I think, very attuned to the ways stories do and don’t get told and what it takes to actually begin to speak about something.
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ROOM: Do you have any words of wisdom for emerging writers who are submitting to this year’s Fiction Contest?
JANIKA OZA: Take your time. Put the story away, come back, read it again. Share the story with even one person you trust. Let it steep. A reader can feel when the writing has been rushed, or when it has been given the time it needs. Even the most urgent, energetic stories need space to breathe.
ROOM: What are you reading these days, and what led you to it?
JO: These days, I’ve been reading a combination of books I’ve been sent for various commitments, manuscripts that are still in the works, and books related to the projects I’m slowly working on myself. I’ve also really enjoyed rereading certain books that I love, such as Melissa Febos’s Body Work and Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River.
ROOM: What do you think makes for a great work of fiction? Are there any particular elements or themes you look for or love to find when picking up your next read?
JO: I love work that feels unafraid. Work that knows itself. Stories that surprise. Stories that are reaching for deeper meanings, puzzling through questions, even if we don’t get to the answers.
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