Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri (born 1962 Calcutta) is an internationally recognized Indian English author and academic. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.

Life

Amit Chaudhuri grew up in Bombay. He has written numerous novels, short stories, poems and critical essays in English. He attended University College London, Balliol College, Oxford and has also been Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College. He was Leverhulme Fellow at Cambridge University, a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, and Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Freie Universität Berlin.

His novels have won several major awards and he has received international critical acclaim. His latest book is The Immortals, a novel about music in the modern world. 2008 saw the publication of Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture, bringing together his major work as a critic. A collection of poems entitled St. Cyril Road and Other Poems appeared in 2005, and in 2001 he edited the influential The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. His study of D.H. Lawrence's poetry, D.H. Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, was called 'truly groundbreaking' by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books. His work appeared in The Guardian.

Amit Chaudhuri is also an acclaimed Indian classical musician, and an internationally recognised singer and composer of Indo-Western experimental music, with an album from each of these genres. His project in experimental music, bringing together the raga, jazz, the blues, rock, techno, disco, and the Indian popular song, is called This is not Fusion, and has been performed worldwide.

On March 18, 2008, he was included in the panel for the Man Booker International Prize 2009, alongside writer Jane Smiley and essayist Andrey Kurkov. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Awards

• 1991 Betty Trask Award and Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book for A Strange and Sublime Address
• 1994 Encore Award, winner for Afternoon Raag
• 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for A New World
• 2002 Sahitya Akademi Award, winner for A New World
• 2011 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, shortlisted for The Immortals

Works

Novels

• A Strange and Sublime Address, 1991; Minerva, 1992, ISBN 9780749399610
• Afternoon Raag, Heinemann, 1993, ISBN 9780434123490
• Freedom Song, Picador, 1998; Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, ISBN 9780375404276 excerpt
• A New World. Picador. 2000. ISBN 9780375410932. http://books.google.com/books?id=z-Fke2tyFX8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=amit+chaudhuri&hl=en&ei=6H7vTa-9GqTo0QHGt9DyDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false. ; Random House Digital, Inc., 2002, ISBN 9780375724800
• The Immortals. Picador. 2009. ISBN 9780307270221. http://books.google.com/books?id=FTUMN00OYoYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=amit+chaudhuri&hl=en&ei=6H7vTa-9GqTo0QHGt9DyDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false. 

Short stories

• Real Time: Stories and a reminiscence, Picador, 2002, ISBN 9780330491303

Poetry

• St. Cyril Road and Other Poems (Penguin, 2005)

Non fiction

• D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present (Oxford, 2003)
• Small Orange Flags (Seagull, 2003) reviewed
• Clearing A Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture. Peter Lang. 2008. ISBN 9781906165017. http://books.google.com/books?id=AQeN2PoAx2IC&printsec=frontcover&dq=amit+chaudhuri&hl=en&ei=6H7vTa-9GqTo0QHGt9DyDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false. 

Anthologies

• Picador/Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001)
• Memory's Gold: Writings on Calcutta (2008)

External links

• ‘Surpanakha’ story at The Little Magazine
• The Writers a poem from The Observer
• "An unlikely radical", The Hindu
• A date with Amit Chaudhuri

Interviews

• Interview with Amit Chaudhuri, Oxonian Review, April 2009
• "I Wish Indian Writing in English Were Less Triumphant" Deutsche Welle
• Transcript of interview with Ramona Koval, The Book Show, ABC Radio National, 20 Novembver 2007