Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra in Leipzig (March 2014)
Born	1969 Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, India
Nationality	Indian
Awards	2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for non fiction
Website	www.pankajmishra.com

Pankaj Mishra (Paṅkaja Miśrā; born 1969, Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, India) is an Indian essayist and novelist and a recipient of the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction.

Biography

Education

Mishra graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce from Allahabad University before earning his Master of Arts degree in English literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Career

In 1992, 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, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), was a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the context of globalisation. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfilment in cultures other than their own, was published in 11 European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His 2004 book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World 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 (2006), describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia. According to Mishra, his most recent work, From the Ruins of Empire (2012), examines the question of "how to find a place of dignity for oneself in this world created by the West, in which the West and its allies in the non-West had reserved the best positions for themselves."

In 2005, Mishra published an anthology of writing on India, India in Mind. His writings have been anthologised in The Picador Book of Journeys (2000), The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (2004), Away: The Indian Writer as Expatriate (2004), and other books.

Mishra has written literary and political essays for The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the New Yorker, among other American, British, and Indian publications. He is a columnist for Bloomberg View and the New York Times Book Review. His work has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Boston Globe, Common Knowledge, the Financial Times, Granta, The Independent, the New Republic, the New Statesman, the Wall Street Journal, n+1, The Nation, Outlook, Poetry, Time, The Times Literary Supplement, Travel + Leisure, and The Washington Post. He divides his time between London and India, and is currently working on a novel.

He was the Visiting Fellow for 2007–08 at the Department of English, University College, London, UK. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008. In November 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 global thinkers. In February 2015, Prospect nominated him to its list of 50 World Thinkers.

In 2011, when Mishra criticised Niall Ferguson's book Civilisation: The West and the Rest in the London Review of Books, and accused Ferguson of racism, Ferguson threatened to sue for libel.

In March 2014, Yale University awarded Mishra the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize.

Recognition

• 2000 Art Seidenbaum award for Best First Fiction
• 2013 Crossword Book Award (nonfiction) for From the Ruins of Empire.
• 2014 Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding for From the Ruins of Empire
• 2014 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (Nonfiction), valued at $150,000 one of the largest prizes in the world of its kind.
• 2014 Premi Internacional D'assaig Josep Palau i Fabre

List of works

Books

• Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995)
• The Romantics (1999)
• An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the World (2004)
• India in Mind, edited by Pankaj Mishra (2005)
• Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond (2006)
• Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011)
• From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (2012)
• A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and Its Neighbours (2013)

External links

• Writer's website
• Pankaj Mishra, resource website at Columbia University
• Pankaj Mishra interview at The Guardian
• Philosopher King by Adam Goodheart – book review in The New York Times
• "Pankaj Mishra, Intellectual and Spiritual Vagrant" – interview by Wendy Cheng at Loggernaut
• "Pankaj Mishra in conversation with Hirsh Sawhney" – interview by Hirsh Sawhney at the Brooklyn Rail
• Pankaj Mishra – interview with Pankaj Mishra by Sarah Fay for "The Believer", 2007
• Podcast of Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy discussing "India in the World" at the Shanghai International Literary Festival
• "Turning the Mirror: A View From the East – A conversation with Pankaj Mishra", Ideas Roadshow, 2013
• Pankaj Mishra in Conversation with Hirsh Sawhney (December 2012)

Reviews & articles

• Pankaj Mishra at The New York Review of Books
• Pankaj Mishra at The Guardian
• Pankaj Mishra at The New Yorker
• Pankaj Mishra at Outlook
• Pankaj Mishra at Bloomberg L.P.