Amit Chaudhuri
Award Name : Sahitya Akademi Award
Year of Award : 2002
Award for : Literature
Location : Kolkata, Bengal, India
Amit Chaudhuri is an Indian English author and academic. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, India's highest literary honour, in 2002 for his novel A New World. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. In 2012, he won the Infosys Prize for Humanities-Literary Studies for his literary criticism. Amit Chaudhuri grew up in Bombay. He has written numerous novels, short stories, poems and critical essays in English. He attended University College London, Balliol College, Oxford and has also been Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College. He was Leverhulme Fellow at Cambridge University, a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, and Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Freie Universität Berlin.
His novels have won several major awards and he has received international critical acclaim. His latest book is The Immortals, a novel about music in the modern world. 2008 saw the publication of Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture, bringing together his major work as a critic. A collection of poems entitled St. Cyril Road and Other Poems appeared in 2005, and in 2001 he edited the influential The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. His study of D.H. Lawrence's poetry, D.H. Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, was called 'truly groundbreaking' by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books. His work appeared in The Guardian. On March 18, 2008, he was included in the panel for the Man Booker International Prize 2009, alongside writer Jane Smiley and essayist Andrey Kurkov. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.