Vikram Chandra | |
---|---|
Born | 23 July 1961 |
Occupation | Writer |
Alma mater | Kenyon College Pomona College (BA) Columbia University School of the Arts Johns Hopkins University (MA) |
Years active | 1993–present |
Notable works | Sacred Games |
Spouse | Melanie Abrams (divorced) |
Parents | Kamna Chandra |
Relatives | Tanuja Chandra (sister) Anupama Chopra (sister) Zuni Chopra (niece) Agni Chopra (nephew) |
Vikram Chandra (born 23 July 1961) is an Indian-American writer. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. [1]
Chandra was born in New Delhi in 1961. His father Navin Chandra was a business executive. His mother Kamna Chandra has written several Hindi films and plays. His sister Tanuja Chandra is a filmmaker and screenwriter [2] who has also directed several films. His other sister Anupama Chopra is a film critic.
Chandra did his high school education at Mayo College in Ajmer, Rajasthan where he was in Bikaner and Tonk house. He was batch of 1979 in Mayo College. He attended at St. Xavier's College in Mumbai and, as an undergraduate student, transferred to Kenyon College in the United States. [3] Chandra felt isolated at Kenyon so he transferred to Pomona College, Claremont, California, where he graduated with a B.A. magna cum laude in English. He attended film school at Columbia University, leaving halfway through to begin work on his first novel. He received his M.A. from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University in 1987. He has taught at George Washington University, and lectured at University of California, Berkeley. [4]
Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), Chandra's first novel, was inspired by the autobiography of James Skinner - the Irish Raja of Hansi in Haryana, a legendary nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian soldier. It was published in 1995 by Penguin Books in India; by Faber and Faber in the UK; and by Little, Brown in the United States. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. The novel is named after a poem from the Kuruntokai , an anthology of Classical Tamil love poems.
Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), a collection of short stories, was published by the same houses as Red Earth and Pouring Rain. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region) and was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize. In 2000, Chandra served as co-writer, with Suketu Mehta, for Mission Kashmir , a Bollywood movie. It was directed by his brother-in-law, the director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, and starred Hrithik Roshan.
Sacred Games (2006) is Chandra's most recent novel. Set in Mumbai, it features Sartaj Singh, a policeman who first appeared in Love and Longing in Bombay. [5] Over 900 pages long, Sacred Games was one of the year's most anticipated new novels. It had been the subject of a bidding war amongst leading publishers in India, the UK, and the US. [6] It has also been adapted as a web television series by Netflix. [7]
Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (2014) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism). [8]
Chandra was married to the writer Melanie Abrams. They are now divorced. [9] Chandra currently divides his time between Mumbai, and Oakland, California, United States. [10] He has two daughters, Leela and Darshana. [11]
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 was 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.
Maurice Gough Gee is a New Zealand novelist. He is one of New Zealand's most distinguished and prolific authors, having written over thirty novels for adults and children, and has won numerous awards both in New Zealand and overseas, including multiple top prizes at the New Zealand Book Awards, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the UK, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, the Robert Burns Fellowship and a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. In 2003 he was recognised as one of New Zealand's greatest living artists across all disciplines by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, which presented him with an Icon Award.
Vikram Seth is an Indian novelist and poet. He has written several novels and poetry books. He has won several awards such as Padma Shri, Sahitya Akademi Award, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, WH Smith Literary Award and Crossword Book Award. Seth's collections of poetry such as Mappings and Beastly Tales are notable contributions to the Indian English language poetry canon.
Anita Desai, is an Indian novelist and Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Literature. She won the Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983). Her other works include 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. Since 2020 she has been a Companion of Literature.
Amitava Kumar is an Indian writer and journalist who is Professor of English, holding the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College.
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 of research, explores the underbelly of the city.
Indian English literature (IEL), also referred to as Indian Writing in English (IWE), is the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language but whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. Its early history began with the works of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt followed by Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao contributed to the growth and popularity of Indian English fiction in the 1930s. It is also associated, in some cases, with the works of members of the Indian diaspora who subsequently compose works in English.
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer, and music composer from India.
Sacred Games is a mystery/thriller novel by Indian-American author Vikram Chandra published in 2006. Upon release, it received critical acclaim and subsequently won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award.
Vikramaditya Motwane is an Indian film director, producer and screenwriter who works in Hindi cinema. He is known for films like Udaan (2010), Lootera (2013), Trapped (2017), and Bhavesh Joshi Superhero (2018).
Tanuja Chandra is an Indian film director and writer. Chandra is the daughter of writer Kamna Chandra and sister of author Vikram Chandra and film critic Anupama Chopra. She co-wrote the screenplay of Yash Chopra's Dil To Pagal Hai (1997) and is known for frequently directing women-oriented films where female characters are the main protagonists, notably Dushman (1998) and Sangharsh (1999).
Anupama Chopra (née Chandra) is an Indian author, journalist and film critic who served as the festival director of the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival from 2015 to 2023. She is also the founder and editor of the now-defunct digital platform Film Companion, which offered a curated look at cinema with an emphasis on Indian film. She has written several books on Indian cinema and has been a film critic for NDTV and India Today, as well as the Hindustan Times. She also hosted a weekly film review show, The Front Row With Anupama Chopra, on Star World. She won the 2000 National Film Award for Best Book on Cinema for her first book Sholay: The Making of a Classic. Chopra joined the Indian iteration of the film journalism outlet The Hollywood Reporter in 2024, launched domestically in the same year by the RP Sanjiv Goenka Group.
Jerry Pinto is a Mumbai-based Indian-English poet, novelist, short story writer, translator, as well as journalist. Pinto's works include Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb (2006), which won the Best Book on Cinema Award at the 54th National Film Awards, Surviving Women (2000) and Asylum and Other Poems (2003). His first novel Em and the Big Hoom was published in 2012. Pinto won the Windham-Campbell prize in 2016 for his fiction. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2016 for his novel Em and the Big Hoom.
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi is an Indian author. His debut novel The Last Song of Dusk (2004) won the Betty Trask Award (UK), the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy, and was nominated for the IMPAC Prize in Ireland. Translated into 16 languages, The Last Song of Dusk was an international bestseller. Shanghvi's second novel, The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay (2009) was short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. His third book, The Rabbit & The Squirrel (2018) with illustrations by Stina Wirsen was described by the Hindustan Times as an 'instant classic'. His acclaimed first work of non-fiction, Loss, is a collection of essays that chart an intimate landscape of death, grief, and healing.
Jeet Thayil is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He is the author of several poetry collections, including These Errors Are Correct (2008), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award. His first novel, Narcopolis, (2012), won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and The Hindu Literary Prize.
Girish Pandurang Kulkarni is an Indian actor, writer, and producer. He is a recipient of two National Film Awards namely, National Film Award for Best Actor in 2011 for his performance in Deool and National Film Award for Best Screenplay for the same film. He is well known for Marathi films such as Valu, Vihir, Deool, Gabhricha Paus and Jaundya Na Balasaheb. He is known to Hindi audiences for his role in the Aamir Khan starrer Dangal and Anurag Kashyap's movie Ugly. He received acclaim for his portrayal of gangster 'Appa' in the 2017 Marathi crime thriller Faster Fene opposite Amey Wagh. He also starred in India's first Netflix original series Sacred Games as the Maharashtra home minister Bipin Bhosale character.
Syed Hussain Zaidi is an Indian author and former investigative journalist. His works include Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia, Mafia Queens of Mumbai, Black Friday, My Name is Abu Salem and Mumbai Avengers.
Sacred Games is an Indian neo-noir crime thriller television series based on Vikram Chandra's 2006 novel of the same name. Produced and directed by Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap under the banner of Phantom Films, it is India's first Netflix original series. The novel was adapted by Varun Grover, Smita Singh, and Vasant Nath. Kelly Luegenbiehl, Erik Barmack and Motwane were the series' executive producers.
Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts is a 2002 Indian non-fiction crime novel written by journalist Hussain Zaidi. It retraces the events that led to the 1993 Bombay bombings and the investigation that followed. It was first published by Penguin Books in 2002 and later in 2008. The novel was adapted into a feature film of the same name directed by Anurag Kashyap.