Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga Biography

Aravind Adiga is a noted Indian writer and journalist whose debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize. Aravind was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu in 1974 to parents both from Mangalore, Karnataka. His other published novels are Between the Assassinations (2008) and Last Man in Tower (2011). His short stories are "The Sultan's Battery", "Smack", "Last Christmas in Bandra" and “The elephant”, published in several newspapers like The guardian and The Sunday times. He is the fifth Indian-born author to win the prize, after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and V. S. Naipaul.

Aravind Adiga was born in Chennai on 23 October 1974 to Dr. K. Madhava Adiga and Usha Adiga. He is the grandson of K. Suryanarayana Adiga, former chairman of Karnataka bank. Adiga was brought up in Mangalore where he completed his school education. He studied at Canara High School, then at St. Aloysius High School, where he stood first for SSLC exams in 1990. Later he migrated to Sydney, Australia, with his family and studied at James Ruse Agricultural High School. He graduated in English literature at Columbia College, Columbia University in New York in the year 1997. Later he studied at Magdalen College, Oxford.

After studies, Adiga started his career as a journalist with Financial Times, where he worked as a financial journalist. His review of Peter Carey's book, Oscar and Lucinda, appeared in The Second Circle and thus he was hired by TIME. He worked as a South Asia correspondent for three years before becoming a freelancer. During his freelance period, he wrote The White Tiger, which won the 2008 Man Booker Prize. After his Booker prize win, its Indian publication sold in excess of 200,000 copies.

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Updated: April 01, 2014