Other links:

Other links:

Amit Chaudhuri

Head of Department, Professor of Creative Writing, Ashoka University

DPhil in English, Oxford University

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of eight novels, the latest of which is Sojourn. He is also a poet, essayist, short story writer, and musician. His New and Selected Poems is scheduled to be published in 2023 in the NYRB Poets series. Faber released a full set of his backlist titles in the U.K. over 2022-23 with introductions by Colm Toibin, James Wood, and Pankaj Mishra. His works of non-fiction include, most recently, Finding the Raga, which received the James Tait Black Prize in 2022. Other awards his work has received include the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award, the Government of West Bengal’s Rabindra Puraskar, and the inaugural Infosys Prize in Literary Studies in the Humanities. He is a Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for the Creative and Critical at Ashoka University. He was Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia from 2006-2021.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of the Modern Language Association of America. He is also an honorary fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He edits literaryactivism.com.

In 2018, he received the Sangeet Samman from the West Bengal government for his contribution to North Indian classical music. He wrote the libretto for Pandit Ravi Shankar’s opera, ‘Sukanya’. He has performed at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on BBC television’s Review Show, at various conferences of North Indian classical music, and his version of ‘Summertime’ is included in BBC 4’s documentary Gershwin’s Summertime: The Song that Conquered the World. His latest album in his project in crossover music is called Across the Universe, and it came out in 2023.

(Fiction)

  • 25th Anniversary Edition of Afternoon Raag published in 2019 by Penguin Random House, India, with a new foreword by the critic James Wood.
  • Friend of My Youth (London: Faber and Faber; New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2017; US, New York Review Books, 2019)
  • 25th Anniversary Edition of A Strange and Sublime Address published in 2016 by Penguin Random House, India, with a new foreword by the novelist Colm Toibin.
  • Odysseus Abroad (London: Oneworld; New York: Knopf; Penguin: New Delhi, 2015) 
  • A Strange and Sublime Address (London: William Heinemann, 1991, distributed in India by Heinemann.)
  • The Immortals (London and New Delhi: Picador; New York: Knopf, 2009)
  • Afternoon Raag (London: William Heinemann, 1993, distributed in India by Heinemann)
  • Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence (London and New Delhi, Picador; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)
  • A New World (London and New Delhi: Picador; New York: Knopf, 2000)
  • Freedom Song: Three Novels – A Strange and Sublime Address; Afternoon Raag; Freedom Song (New York: Knopf, 1999)
  • Freedom Song (London and New Delhi: Picador, 1998)

(Non-Fiction)

  • The Origins of Dislike (Oxford University Press, UK, US, and India, September 2018)
  • Telling Tales: Essays (London: Union Books; New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2013)
  • Calcutta: Two Years in the City (London: Union Books; New York: Knopf; New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2013) 
  • Clearing a Space: Essays on India, Literature, and Culture (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang; New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007)
  • D H Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002)

(Poetry) 

  • Sweet Shop and other poems (Salt, UK, and Penguin Random House India, 2019)
  • St Cyril Road and other poems (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003)

Books Edited

  • Literary Activism: Perspectives (New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press; Norwich: Boiler House Press, 2017) 
  • Memory’s Gold: Writings on Calcutta (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008)
  • The Picador/Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (London and New Delhi: Picador; New York: Vintage, 2002/2003)
  • Critical and Creative Writing Workshop
  • Honorary fellowship, Balliol College, Oxford, 2019

  • West Bengal government’s Rabindra Puraskar in 2012

  • Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 2009

  • Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award, 2002

  • Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, 2000

  • Betty Trask Prize for Best First Novel published in the UK and the Commonwealth, Society of Authors UK, 1991

  • Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel in the Europe and Asia Regions, 1992

  • Encore Prize for Best Second Novel published in the UK and the Commonwealth, Society of Authors, UK, 1993

Study at Ashoka

Study at Ashoka

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