When the rights were originally sold to Warner Brothers in 2004, following a $2m bidding war, Roberts’s protagonist, Lin, was to be played by Johnny Depp, who the author personally chose because of Depp’s love of the book. More than seven million copies have been sold worldwide, in 39 languages, turning Roberts into one of the world’s most unlikely publishing sensations.Īnd now, almost two decades after screen rights were first sold, Shantaram is finally being retold via a 12-part Apple TV+ series starring the British actor Charlie Hunnam, best known as Jax in the crime drama Sons of Anarchy. Nine-hundred-and-thirty-six pages of peril and lust and late nights at the Leopold Cafe in Mumbai, it was, for a period, ubiquitous on bookshelves in hostels all over South Asia and read by almost every twentysomething backpacker. Shantaram, a novel by Roberts based on his own experiences, became a cultural touchstone when it was published in 2003, speaking to a generation of typically fiction-averse young men. Having gone from heroin addict to armed robber before fleeing to India to become a mafioso-slash-slum-doctor, this spiritual Caribbean twist of a third act feels somehow fitting.

The red stripe of a Hindu tika stretches from the 70-year-old author’s hairline down to his brows beads and chains tinkle softly when he motions left or right. He cast off shirts, along with shoes, several years ago – it “literally just happened organically,” he tells me via Zoom from his home off the north coast of Jamaica, sun streaming through a window. Gregory David Roberts isn’t wearing a shirt when we meet.

David roberts shantaram