Rohinton Mistry is an Indian-born Canadian writer. He has been the recipient of many awards including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2012. Each of his first three novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His novels to date have been set in India, told from the perspective of Parsis, and explore themes of family life, poverty, discrimination, and the corrupting influence of society.
Midnight's Children is a 1981 novel by Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie, published by Jonathan Cape with cover design by Bill Botten, about India's transition from British colonial rule to independence and partition. It is a postcolonial, postmodern and magical realist story told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, set in the context of historical events. The style of preserving history with fictional accounts is self-reflexive.
Anita Desai, born Anita Mazumdar is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea. The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London.
Kerri Sakamoto is a Canadian novelist. Her novels commonly deal with the experience of Japanese Canadians.
Amanda Hager is a writer of fiction and non-fiction for children, young adults and adults. Many of her books have been shortlisted for or won awards, including Singing Home the Whale which won both the Young Adult fiction category and the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults in 2015. She has been the recipient of several fellowships, residencies and prizes, including the Beatson Fellowship in 2012, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship in 2014, the Waikato University Writer in Residence in 2015 and the Margaret Mahy Medal and Lecture Award in 2019.
In the Bombay riots in December 1992 and January 1993, an estimated 900 people died. The riots were mainly due to escalations of hostilities after large scale protests by Muslims in reaction to the 1992 Babri Masjid Demolition by Hindu Karsevaks in Ayodhya; and by Hindu mobs in regards with the Ram Temple issue.
Bellur Narayanaswamy Srikrishna is an Indian jurist and a retired judge of the Supreme Court of India. From 1993 to 1998, he headed the "Srikrishna Commission" that investigated causes and apportioned blame for the Bombay riots of 1992–93. He is currently the chairman of the Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission (FSLRC) and also works as an independent arbitrator.
Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. His autobiographical account of his experiences in Mumbai, Maximum City, was published in 2004. The book, based on two and a half years research, explores the underbelly of the city.
The Kiriyama Prize was an international literary award awarded to books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia. Its goal was to encourage greater understanding among the peoples and nations of the region. Established in 1996, the prize was last awarded in 2008.
Vikram Chandra is an Indian-American writer. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book.
Chinchpokli is a neighbourhood in South Mumbai. It is also the name of a railway station on the Central line of the Mumbai suburban railway. Historical British era spellings include Chinchpugli and Chinchpooghly. The neighbourhood is named after the Marathi words for tamarind (chinch) and betel nut (pofali).
Ajai Singh "Sonny" Mehta was an Indian editor and the editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer, and music composer from India.
Ravishankar Raval (1892–1977) was a painter, art teacher, art critic, journalist and essayist from Gujarat, India. He worked for the magazine Vismi Sadi until it closed in 1921, and then founded the cultural magazine Kumar.
Mehta is an Indian surname, derived from the Sanskrit word mahita meaning 'great' or 'praised'. It is found among several Indian religious groups, including Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Parsis. Among Hindus, it is used by a wide range of castes and social groups, including Brahmins, Rajputs and Banias. Among Oswals, Porwal, and Punjabi Khatris, Mehta is a clan name.
Karan Mahajan is an Indian-American novelist, essayist, and critic. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. He has contributed writing to The Believer, The Daily Beast, the San Francisco Chronicle, Granta, and The New Yorker. In 2017, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.
Saleem Sinai is the protagonist of the Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. His life is closely intertwined with the events that take place in his homeland of pre- and post-colonial India, and newly created Pakistan and Bangladesh. He is born at the moment in time when India and Pakistan emerge from British rule and lives during the new tumultuous struggles that engulf the new nations following 15 August 1947. Sinai embodies these physical struggles and rifts during, and serves as a metaphor for, the spiritual, religious, political and intellectual traumas of the young nations.
Tanuja Desai Hidier is an Indian-American author and singer/songwriter. She is best known for her 2002 young adult novel Born Confused, and its 2014 sequel Bombay Blues.
Barbara Demick is an American journalist. She was the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood. Her second book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, was published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House in December 2009 and Granta Books in 2010. An animated feature film based on the book and sharing the same title was planned to be directed by Andy Glynne. The project launched in 2012 and a pilot was released in 2015. Its status as of January 2018 is not clear.
The Asian American Literary Awards are a set of annual awards that have been presented by The Asian American Writers' Workshop since 1998. The awards include a set of honors for excellence in fiction, poetry and nonfiction, chosen by a panel of literary and academic judges; a Members' Choice Award, voted on by the Workshop's members from the list of that year's entries; and a Lifetime Achievement Award. To be eligible, a book must be written by someone of Asian descent living in the United States and published first in English; entries are actively solicited by the Workshop.
