Amit Chaudhuri

File:Amit Chaudhuri (Photo by Geoff Pugh) .jpg

Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri (born 15 May 1962) is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer, and music composer from India. He is currently a professor of creative writing at Ashoka University.

He was previously professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia from 2006 to 2021. In 2013, he was awarded the Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution to the humanities in Literary Studies

In January 2018, Chaudhuri began writing a series for The Paris Review titled The Moment. He also wrote an occasional column, "Telling Tales", for The Telegraph.

Personal life

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta (renamed Kolkata) in 1962 and grew up in Bombay (renamed Mumbai). He took his first degree in English literature from University College London, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on D. H. Lawrence's poetry at Balliol College, Oxford.

He is married to Rosinka Chaudhuri, Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC).

Music

Chaudhuri is a singer in the North Indian classical tradition, who has performed internationally. He learned singing from his mother, Bijoya Chaudhuri, and from the late Pandit Govind Prasad Jaipurwale of the Kunwar Shyam gharana

Awards and honours

• 1991 Betty Trask Award and Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book for A Strange and Sublime Address
• 1994 Encore Award and Southern Arts Literature Prize, Afternoon Raag
• 2009 Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
• 2012 Infosys Prize for the Humanities in Literary Studies
• 2020 Honorary Fellow, Modern Language Association (MLA)
• 2022 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Biography, Finding the Raga.

Bibliography

Novels

• A strange and sublime address. Penguin, 1991, Template:ISBN
• Afternoon Raag. Heinemann, 1993, Template:ISBN The book won the Encore Award. The 25th anniversary edition was published by Penguin Random House India in 2019 with a foreword by James Wood.
• Freedom Song. Picador, 1998; Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, Template:ISBN excerpt
• ; Random House Digital, Inc., 2002, Template:ISBN
• Friend of My Youth, 2017, Penguin Random House India

Libretto

• Sukanya, the only opera by Ravi Shankar

Non-fiction

• Small Orange Flags (Seagull, 2003) reviewedTemplate:Category handler
• Calcutta: Two Years in the City, Union Books (2013)

Edited anthologies

• Memory's Gold: Writings on Calcutta (2008)

Dissertation

Chaudhuri's D.Phil. dissertation at Oxford was published by Clarendon Press as a monograph titled D.H. Lawrence and Difference in 2003. It was called a "classic" by Tom Paulin in his preface to the book; Terry Eagleton wrote in the London Review of Books that it is "a fine book, which if it had expanded its scope and dug rather deeper might even have been even better".

See also

• List of Indian writers

External links

• Amit Chaudhuri at Twitter
• Template:British council
• Amit Chaudhuri at the Munzinger-Archiv
• Amit Chaudhuri at the Los Angeles Review of Books
• "Surpanakha", story at The Little Magazine
• "An unlikely radical", The Hindu
• "A date with Amit Chaudhuri", The Telegraph