Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri (born 15 May 1962) is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer, and music composer from India.

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta (renamed Kolkata) in 1962 and grew up in Bombay (renamed Mumbai).

His father was the first Indian CEO of Britannia Industries Limited.

His mother, Bijoya Chaudhuri, was a highly acclaimed singer of Rabindra Sangeet, Nazrulgeeti, Atul Prasad and Hindi bhajans.

He was a student at the Cathedral and John Connon School, Bombay.

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).

They have one daughter.

It unfolds over the course of a single day, in July in 1985 London, following the student protagonist, Ananda.

Friend of My Youth is Chaudhuri's seventh novel.

A Strange and Sublime Address, Chaudhuri's first novel, published in 1991, was republished by Penguin Random House India in 2016 as a 25th anniversary edition, with a foreword by Colm Toibin.

Afternoon Raag, his second novel, interleaves experiences of Oxford with memories of Bombay.

It was published in 1993 and won the Encore Award.

Published in America with the first two novels, in 2000 it won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

A New World (2001), Chaudhuri's fourth novel, tells the story of Jayojit Chatterjee, who returns after a divorce with his seven-year-old son Vikram (“Bonny”) to Calcutta to visit his aging parents.

It won the Sahitya Akademi Award.

Chaudhuri edited the influential anthology The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature in 2001.

Real Time, Chaudhuri's collection of short fiction, was published in 2002.

The title story, "Real Time", is prescribed reading for English in the GCSE syllabus in the UK.

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, and a "path-breaking work" by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books.

He was Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia from 2006 to 2021, Since 2020, he has been at Ashoka University, India, as Professor of Creative Writing and, since 2021, is also Director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical, Ashoka University.

He also edited Memory's Gold: Writings on Calcutta (2008)

The Immortals, his fifth novel, published in 2009, follows Nirmalya and his music teacher, Shyamji, as they learn and practice Indian classical music in a changing world.

On Tagore, a collection of Chaudhuri's essays on Rabindranath Tagore, was awarded the Rabindra Puraskar in 2012.

His first major work of non-fiction, Calcutta: Two Years in the City, was published in 2013 as was Telling Tales, his second book of essays.

Odysseus Abroad, Chaudhuri's sixth novel, appeared in 2014-15.

It was published in the UK and India in 2017 and in the US in 2019.

It is an account of a narrator and novelist called Amit Chaudhuri who visits Bombay, a city where he grew up, for a book event.

Sojourn, Chaudhuri's eighth novel, was published in 2022.

Here, an unnamed man arrives in Berlin as a visiting professor.

His growing absorption in his surrounding is accompanied by a loosening of his grasp on memory.

Non-fiction

Chaudhuri's D.Phil.

Chaudhuri began writing a series for The Paris Review titled The Moment from January 2018.

He also wrote an occasional column, "Telling Tales", for The Telegraph.

Fiction

The 25th anniversary edition was published by Penguin Random House India in 2019 with a foreword by James Wood.

Freedom Song, his third novel, was published four years later.

Set against the background of the post-Babri Masjid demolition, it is a record of both the artificial quiet that such a socio-political situation creates as well as the evocation of a Calcutta winter where everyday life must go on.