Vikram Seth | |
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Born | Calcutta, West Bengal, India | 20 June 1952
Occupation |
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Alma mater | Corpus Christi College, Oxford Stanford University |
Period | 1980–present |
Genre | Novels, poetry, libretto, travel writing, children's literature, biography/memoir |
Notable works | A Suitable Boy The Golden Gate An Equal Music |
Notable awards | Padma Shri, Sahitya Academy, Stegner Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Commonwealth Writers' Prize |
Website | |
www |
Vikram Seth CBE , FRSL (born 20 June 1952) is an Indian novelist and poet. [2] 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. [3]
Seth was born on 20 June 1952 in Calcutta. His father, Prem Nath Seth, was an executive of Bata Shoes and his mother, Leila Seth, a Barrister by training, became the first female judge of the Delhi High Court and first woman to become Chief justice of a state High Court in India. [4]
Seth was educated at the all-boys' private boarding school The Doon School in Dehradun, where he was editor-in-chief of The Doon School Weekly . [5] At Doon, he was influenced by his teacher, the mountaineer Gurdial Singh, who taught him geography and according to Leila Seth, "guided Vikram in many ways...encouraged him to appreciate Western classical music and instilled in him a love of adventure and daring." [5] Singh later described Seth as an "indefatigable worker, and he maintains without difficulty his distinguished level in studies...he has put in enormous amount of energy in other spheres of school life, in dramatics, in debating, in first aid, in music, and in editing the Doon School Weekly." [5] After graduating from Doon, Seth went to Tonbridge School, England, to complete his A-levels. [6] [7] Later he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He then pursued a Ph.D. in Economics at Stanford University though never completed it. [8] [9] [10]
Seth has published eight books of poetry and three novels. In 1980, he wrote Mappings , his first book of poetry. The publication of A Suitable Boy , a 1,349-page novel, propelled Seth into the public limelight. It was adapted into a BBC television drama miniseries in 2020. [11] His second novel, An Equal Music, deals with the troubled love-life of a violinist. Seth's work Two Lives, published in 2005, is a memoir of the marriage of his great-uncle and aunt.
In addition to The Golden Gate, Seth has written other works of poetry including Mappings (1980), The Humble Administrator's Garden (1985), All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990) and Three Chinese Poets (1992). His children's book, Beastly Tales from Here and There (1992) consists of 10 stories about animals. He has written a travel book, From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983), an account of a journey through Tibet, China and Nepal. He was also commissioned by the English National Opera to write a libretto based on the Greek legend of Arion and the Dolphin. The opera was performed for the first time in June 1994.
A sequel to A Suitable Boy, A Suitable Girl , was announced in 2009, but has yet to be published.
Seth's former literary agent Giles Gordon recalled being interviewed by Seth for the position, "Vikram sat at one end of a long table and he began to grill us. It was absolutely incredible. He wanted to know our literary tastes, our views on poetry, our views on plays, which novelists we liked". [12] Seth later explained to Gordon that he had passed the interview not because of commercial considerations, but because unlike the others he was the only agent who seemed as interested in his poetry as in his other writing. Seth followed what he has described as "the ludicrous advance for that book" (£250,000 for A Suitable Boy) [13] with £500,000 for An Equal Music and £1.4 million for Two Lives. [14] He prepared an acrostic poem [15] for his address at Gordon's 2005 memorial service. [16]
On 16 June, 2024, publishing house Speaking Tiger announced the release of Seth's English translation of the sacred Hindu hymn "Hanuman Chalisa" - his first new work in over a decade. [17]
Seth commented on the Indian general elections held during the summer of 2024 saying that "we live in a better situation now than we lived a month ago". He made this comment less than a month after the elections were over and a new coalition government had been sworn in. Seth said "at least now there is somewhat of limitation on autocracy." [18]
On the recent sanction [19] to prosecute the author Arundhati Roy, he noted that it was "craziness." [18]
Seth is bisexual. He was in a relationship with the violinist Philippe Honoré for ten years and dedicated his novel An Equal Music to him. [20] [21] In 2006, he became a leader of the campaign against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a law against homosexuality. [20] When Section 377 was reinstated in 2013, Seth continued campaigning against the law. [22] [23] [24]
Seth divides his time between the United Kingdom, where he bought and renovated the former home of the Anglican poet George Herbert near Salisbury, and India, where he has a family home in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. [25]
Hanuman Chalisa [28]
This section of a biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification .(November 2023) |
Rambola Dubey, known as Tulsidas, was a Vaishnava (Ramanandi) Hindu saint and poet, renowned for his devotion to the deity Rama. He wrote several popular works in Sanskrit, Awadhi, and Braj Bhasha, but is best known as the author of the Hanuman Chalisa and of the epic Ramcharitmanas, a retelling of the Sanskrit Ramayana, based on Rama's life, in the vernacular Awadhi language.
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The Golden Gate (1986) is the first novel by poet and novelist Vikram Seth. The work is a novel in verse composed of 590 Onegin stanzas. It was inspired by Charles Johnston's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
The Doon School is a selective all-boys private boarding school in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India, which was established in 1935. It was envisioned by Satish Ranjan Das, a lawyer from Calcutta, as a school modelled on the British public school while remaining conscious of Indian ambitions and desires. The school admitted its first pupils on 10 September 1935, and formally opened on 27 October 1935, with Lord Willingdon presiding over the ceremony. The school's first headmaster was Arthur E. Foot, an English educationalist who had spent nine years as a science master at Eton College, England.
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.
The Hanuman Chalisa is a Hindu devotional hymn (stotra) in praise of Hanuman, and popularly recited by millions of Hindus everyday. It is an Awadhi language text attributed to Tulsidas, and is his best known text apart from the Ramcharitmanas. The word 'chālīsā' is derived from 'chālīs' meaning the number 'forty' in Hindi, denoting the number of verses in the Hanuman Chalisa.
Paul Henry is a Welsh poet, songwriter and broadcaster. His poetry collection Boy Running was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year award in 2016.
A Suitable Boy is a novel by Vikram Seth, published in 1993. With 1,349 pages, the English-language book is one of the longest novels published in a single volume.
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M. S. Rama Rao was an Indian singer and composer. He was the very first playback singer in the Telugu filmdom and popular for his devotional songs.
Beastly Tales from Here and There is a 1992 collection of ten fables in poetry written by Vikram Seth. In the introduction, Seth states,"The first two come from India, the next two from China, the next two from Greece, the next two from Ukraine. The final two came directly to me from the Land of Gup."
A Suitable Girl is an upcoming novel by Vikram Seth that is a sequel to his 1993 book A Suitable Boy. Seth has said the book will be set in the present, rather than in 1952 when A Suitable Boy finished, and will therefore be what Seth calls a "jump sequel". The book was announced in 2009 but has yet to be completed.
Rajagopal Parthasarathy is an Indian poet, translator, critic, and editor.
Kavita Seth is an Indian singer, who is most known as a playback singer in Hindi cinema, as well as a performer of Ghazals and Sufi music, and leads a Sufi musical group, Karwaan Group. She is currently based in Mumbai, India.
The Doon School Weekly is a student newspaper produced by and for the students of The Doon School. It was established in 1936, a year after the school's founding, by the first headmaster Arthur Foot. The Weekly is the oldest and flagship publication of the school.
Adil Jehangir Jussawalla is an Indian poet, magazine editor and translator. He has written two books of poetry, Land's End and Missing Person.
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A Suitable Boy is a British television drama miniseries directed by Mira Nair and adapted by Andrew Davies from Vikram Seth's 1993 novel of the same name. Set in the backdrop of post-independent India, A Suitable Boy follows four linked families in North India, where the story revolves around Mrs. Rupa Mehra who is in search of a suitable husband for her youngest daughter Lata. Meanwhile, the daughter is torn between her duty towards her mother and the idea of romance with her suitors.
Aradhana Seth is an Indian art director, artist, production designer and filmmaker who has worked in the Hindi film industry as well as for Hollywood productions like Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, London Has Fallen and The Bourne Supremacy. As an artist, Seth has exhibited her works at Chemould Prescott Road Gallery, Grosvenor Gallery, KHOJ New Delhi. Seth also produced the 2020 BBC adaptation of her brother, Vikram Seth's novel A Suitable Boy. She is based in Goa, India.
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