Amit Chaudhuri is the author of eight novels, the latest of which is Sojourn. He is also a poet, essayist, critic, short story writer, and musician. 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, with covers designed by Pete Adlington. His first three novels were issued in New York Review Books Classics imprint in 2024, with introductions by Colm Toibin, James Wood, and Wendy Doniger. Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems was published in 2023 in the NYRB Poets series. Two of his writing notebooks are stored in the University of East Anglia’s Archive of Contemporary British Writing. 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 Betty Trask 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.
Among the prizes he has judged are the Man Booker International Prize, the PEN Nabokov Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Awards (as chair).
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, and, since 2023, edits the Literary Activism imprint, a publishing partnership between the CCC and Westland Books.
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.
