In 2019, famed journalist and writer Aatish Taseer was thrown out of India. Soon after he wrote a cover article for Time calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi the country’s “divider in chief”, New Delhi decided to revoke his residency.

That sent Aatish on a journey across the world—to places like Turkey, Spain, Mexico and Sri Lanka—to explore identity, both his own and of different nations. The result is his latest book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile.

Aatish is the author of the memoir Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands (Canongate) and the acclaimed novels The Way Things Were (Pan Macmillan, 2014), a finalist for the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize, The Temple-Goers (Viking, 2010), short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award, and Noon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); and the memoir and travelog The Twice-Born (Hurst, 2019).

Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.