Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra Biography

Pankaj Mishra is an award-winning Indian essayist and novelist. Mishra writes literary and political essays for UK and US publications like The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, "London Review of Books" and the 'New Yorker". He also writes for several Indian publications. He is a columnist for "Bloomberg View" and the "New York Times Book Review". He divides his time between London and India, and is presently working on a novel.

Mishra graduated in commerce from Allahabad University and later earned his Master of Arts degree in English literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. In 1992, Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village where he worked as a columnist for The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. He used to write essays and reviews. His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995) was a travelogue. His novel, The Romantics was published in the year 2000 for which he received the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004), Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006) and From the Ruins of Empire (2012) are his other published novels.

In 2005, Mishra published an anthology of writing on India, ‘India in Mind’. The Picador Book of Journeys (2000), The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (2004), and Away: The Indian Writer as Expatriate are other anthology works published till now. He was the Visiting Fellow for 2007-2008 at the Department of English, University College London, UK. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008. From the Ruins of Empire (2012) received Crossword Book Award (non-fiction) in the year 2013.

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Updated: January 21, 2014