Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969. He graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce from the Allahabad University before completing his MA in English Literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He wrote his first novel when he was only seventeen years old, and two further novels followed, although none have been published.

In 1992, he moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book was Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), a travelogue which described the social and cultural changes in India in the new context of globalization. (Picador will publish a new and revised edition of Butter Chicken in Ludhiana in the UK and India in late 2006.) His novel The Romantics (2000) an ironic tale of people longing for fulfillment in cultures other than their own, was published in eleven European languages and won the Los Angles Times’ Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His recent book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004), a New York Times notable book, mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha’s relevance to contemporary times. His most recent book, Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond, describes Mishra’s travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia.

In 2005, Mishra published an anthology of writing on India titled India in Mind (Vintage). His writings have been anthologized in The Picador Book of Journeys (2000), The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (2004), and Away: The Indian Writer as Expatriate (Penguin), among other titles. He has introduced new editions of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (Modern Library), E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (Penguin Classics), J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (NYRB
Classics), and R. K. Narayan’s The Ramayana (Penguin Classics). He has also
introduced two volumes of V.S. Naipaul’s essays, The Writer and the World and
Literary Occasions.

Mishra writes literary and political essays for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and the New Statesman, among other American, British, and Indian publications. His work has also appeared in the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Time, The Independent, Granta, The Nation, N+1, Poetry, Common Knowledge, Outlook, and Travel & Leisure. He was a visiting professor at Wellesley College in 2001 and 2004. In 2004-2005 he received a fellowship at the Cullmen Center for Writers and Scholars, New York Public Library. He divides his time between London and India, and is presently working on a novel. He is represented by the literary agency Gillon Aitken Associates.

add to my favorite writers