The world premiere of "Babur" took place in Switzerland in 2012, followed by tours to the United Kingdom (performed at theatres in London and Oxford) and India. At the work's core is an exploration about the complexities of faith and multiculturalism in modern-day Britain. Its action hinges on an imagined encounter between a group of religious fundamentalists and the ghost of Babur, who challenges their plans for a suicide strike. Thayil is also known as a performance poet and musician. As a songwriter and guitarist, he is one half of the contemporary music project Sridhar/Thayil (Mumbai, New Delhi). Thayil was also a guitarist for the psychedelic rock band Atomic Forest in the early 1980s for a brief period. In 2006 he told the Indian newspaper "The Hindu" that he had been an alcoholic (like many of the Bombay poets) and an addict for almost two decades: "I spent most of that time sitting in bars, getting very drunk, talking about writers and writing. And never writing. It was a colossal waste. I feel very fortunate that I got a second chance." These days, he says, the only addictions he has are poetry and coffee. "Coffee's much easier to get than heroin." He has worked as a journalist in New York, Mumbai and Bangalore. In 2012, Thayil's poetry collection "These Errors are Correct" was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for English. He was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 and "The Hindu" Literary Prize (2013) for his debut novel "Narcopolis". In 2013, Thayil became the first Indian author to win the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, worth $50,000, for the novel "Narcopolis". The Indian poet Dom Moraes, in his introduction to Thayil's first book of poems (with poet Vijay Nambisan), "Gemini", said that Thayil did not trouble his mind with the concerns of many Indian poets, their Indianness, that he did not make statements that were irrelevant to his work, that his concerns were mainly personal. Thayil, Moraes said, "works his feelings out with care, through colourations of mood rather than through explicit statements." His idiom is the result of a cosmopolitan blend of styles, and is yet, quite clearly, his own. About "Narcopolis", Thayil said, "I've always been suspicious of the novel that paints India in soft focus, a place of loved children and loving elders, of monsoons and mangoes and spices.