Their books read like bestselling thrillers. Except that the people in their stories, the bomb blasts and terrorists killing and maiming people are all real. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, former journalists with The Guar­dian and Sunday Times, talk about their brand of writing to Satish Padmanabhan.



First The Meadow, now The Siege: you seem to have hit upon a new genre, a sort of a non-fiction thriller.

Adrian Levy: We have carried out postmortems on ‘news’ events or social phenomena for more than 18 years, whether it be precious gems in Myanmar, or cultural relics like the Amber Room, in St Petersburg, and both of us identified with the philosophy of the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who was always last to the story but first to the truth. I am a great reader of novels but the truth can be far more exhilarating. And dangerous. Telling the truth in conflict zones or in places where people...