Stephen Alter

Stephen Alter (born 1956) is an American author, primarily of non-fiction but also of fiction, who was born and raised in India, where he grew up as the son of missionaries. His childhood was spent primarily in the small British Raj-era hill station of Landour in the Lower Western Himalaya.

He graduated from Woodstock School (where his father, Rev. Bob 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.

He is married to Ameeta and has a son, Jayant, and daughter, Shibani. His first cousin Tom Alter is a noted Indian theatre, television and film actor as well as a cricket writer.

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)

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)

Editor

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