Author photo by Geoff Pugh.

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of seven novels, including, most recently, Friend of My Youth , as well as a work of non-fiction, Calcutta , and collections of short stories, essays, and a critical study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry. He has two previous books of poetry: St Cyril Road and Sweet Shop . He has received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of the Modern Language Association in America.

Chaudhuri is Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University. Alongside this, he is an admired singer in the North Indian classical trad-ition and a composer and performer in a celebrated project that brings together the raga, blues and jazz with a variety of other musical traditions.

He is the editor of literaryactivism.com.