Amit Chaudhuri – Indian Author

Amit Chaudhuri was born in 1962 in Kolkata (former Calcutta) and grew up in Mumbai (former Bombay). He has authored novels such as A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, Freedom Song, A New World and The Immortals. He has written short stories such as Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence while he has also written a collection of poetry titled St. Cyril Road and Other Poems. His non-fiction works include: D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, Small Orange Flags and Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture. Some of his other writings have been included in Picador/Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature and Memory's Gold: Writings on Calcutta.

Currently, Amit Chaudhuri teaches Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. In 2009, he was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He attended University College in London where he studied English and passed out with a First Class. He completed his PhD on Critical Theory and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence from Balliol College in Oxford. He was a Dervorguilla Scholar during his days in Oxford. He was also a Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. Previously, he taught the Commonwealth and International Literature section at Cambridge. He also taught at Columbia University in the U.S. and Free University in Germany. Further he has participated and contributed to lectures and readings at educational institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), 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.

Amit Chaudhuri has been the recipient of several awards. He won the Encore Award for his novel, The Afternoon Raag, Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Sahitya Akademi Award for A New World, and the Betty Trask Award and Commonwealth Writers Prize for A Strange and Sublime Address. The Immortals was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. It went on to be acknowledged in 2009 as a New Yorker Book of the Year, a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year and Reviewers Choice, among the Best Books of 2009 in the Boston Globe and the Irish Times. In 2009, he was part of the panel of judges of the Man Booker International Prize.

To add more, Amit Chaudhuri is also a trained singer in the Indian classical tradition and he also composes Indo-Western fusion music. He is working on an international musical project assimilating raga, jazz, the blues, rock, techno and disco.