Stephen Alter

For the professor of history, see Stephen G. Alter.

Stephen Alter (born 1956) is an author of non-fiction and fiction, who was born and raised in India, where he grew up as the son of American missionaries. He lives in Littleton, Colorado.

He graduated from Woodstock School (where his father, Robert Alter, served as Principal from 1968 to 1978) in Landour and subsequently from Wesleyan University.

He has taught writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the American University in Cairo. He has been awarded Fulbright Program and Guggenheim Fellowship grants and received an honorary degree from Wesleyan University. He is the founding director of the Mussoorie Mountain Festival. His most recent non-fiction book Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime received the 2015 Kekoo Naoroji Award for Himalayan Literature. His most recent novel about Jim Corbett In the Jungles of the Night was shortlisted for the 2017 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

Selected titles

Non-Fiction

• All the Way to Heaven: An American Boyhood in the Himalayas (1998)
• Amritsar to Lahore: A Journey Across the India-Pakistan Border (2000)
• Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage Up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture (2001)
• Elephas Maximus: A Portrait of the Indian Elephant (2004)
• Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief (2007)
• Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime (2014)
• Wild Himalaya: A Natural History of the Greatest Mountain Range on Earth (2019)

Fiction

• Neglected Lives (1979)
• Silk and Steel (1980)
• The Godchild (1988)
• Renuka (1990)
• Aripan & Other Stories (2005)
• The Rataban Betrayal (2013)
• In the Jungles of the Night: A Novel about Jim Corbett (2016)
• The Dalliance of Leopards (2017)

For Young Readers

• The Phantom Isles (2007)
• Ghost Letters (2008)
• The Secret Sanctuary (2015)
• The Cloudfarers (2018)

Editor

• The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories (2001)