Pankaj Mishra

Author

In 1992, author Pankaj Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer.

His first book was “Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India “(1995), a travelogue which described the social and cultural changes in India in the new context of globalization. His novel “The Romantics” (2000) was an ironic tale of people longing for fulfillment in cultures other than their own. His book “An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World” (2004), mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha’s relevance to contemporary times. “Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond,” describes Mishra’s travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia.

Published in 2012, “From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia” became the first book by a non-Western writer to win Germany’s prestigious Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, in 2014. His new book is “A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and its Neighbours.”

Mishra writes literary and political essays for a wide range of publications around the world. He was a visiting professor at Wellesley College in 2001, 2004, and 2006. In 2004-2005 he received a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, New York Public Library. For 2007-08, he was the Visiting Fellow at the Department of English, University College, London. In 2009, he was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969. He graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce from the Allahabad University before completing his MA in English Literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.