Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London, where he took his BA with First Class Honours, and completed his doctorate on critical theory and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Dervorguilla Scholar.

Amit has written four novels. The first, A Strange and Sublime Address, published in 1991, won the first prize in the Society of Authors' Betty Trask Awards for a first novel and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia). The second, Afternoon Raag (1993), won the Society of Authors' Encore Prize for best second novel and the Southern Arts Literature Prize. Both books were shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. His third novel, Freedom Song, appeared in 1998. All three novels were published in a single omnibus volume, Freedom Song: Three Novels, by Knopf in America in 1999. This omnibus volume was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and an Independent bestseller in America; it was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, 2000, and was one of the New York Public Library's 25 Books to Remember, 2000.

His fourth novel, A New World, won the Sahitya Akademi award 2002, India's highest literary honour for a single book.

Amit was Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford from 1992-95, and Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, Cambridge University until April 99, where he taught the Commonwealth and International Literatures paper of the English Tripos. He was recently on the faculty of the School of the Arts, Columbia University, for the Fall semester, 2002.  His criticism and fiction have appeared regularly in most of the major journals in the world, including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Observer, the Spectator, Granta, the New Republic, and the New Yorker. A short film was made about him by the BBC for their 'India Week' on the Late Show.

Amit's writing has been, and is being, translated into several languages. He is the editor of the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, which is also to be published in the US by Vintage in September 2004. His book of short stories, Real Time, was published in 2002 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in Britain and India by Picador, while his collection of essays, In Parenthesis: Essays on Literature and Culture, is due later. His dissertation on DH Lawrence, DH Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, appeared to critical acclaim from the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in June 2003, with an introduction by the renowned Irish poet-critic, Tom Paulin..

Amit has given lectures and readings at various universities and institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge, the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Wellesley College, the University of Chicago, Penn State University, and Emory University.

''One of the most dazzling new talents of any nationality. We come away from his work awed by the brilliance of this language and haunted by his piercing depiction of contemporary India'' - San Francisco Chronicle.

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