Is There a Modern Indian Literature?

Amit Chaudhuri

Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, critic, and musician. The Guardian called him “one of his generation’s best writers”; Hilary Mantel, in the New York Review of Books, said that “Chaudhuri has, like Proust, perfected the art of the moment.” He has written eight novels, the latest of which is Sojourn. Among the many awards he has won for his fiction are the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Indian government’s Sahitya Akademi Award. His book about North Indian classical music and creativity, Finding the Raga (2021), won the James Tait Black Prize. He was also awarded the inaugural Infosys Prize in the Humanities for Literary Studies for his critical work. He has published a critical study on D. H. Lawrence’s poetry, called a “pathbreaking work” by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books, three collections of critical essays, four collections of poetry, and a book of short stories. His most recent book is Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems 1985-2023 (New York Review Books).

He is Director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association and of Balliol College, Oxford. He was Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia from 2006 – 2021.