Indian writer and journalist (born 1963)

Amitava *ar (born 17 March 1963) is an Indian writer and journalist who is Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at V*ar College.

Contents

• 1 Early life
• 2 Work
  • 2.1 Overview
  • 2.2 Published works
    • 2.2.1 Books
    • 2.2.2 Edited works
    • 2.2.3 Forewords and introductory notes
  • 2.3 Awards and fellowships
• 3 External links
• 4 References

Early life

*ar was born in the city of Arrah in the Indian state of Bihar on 17 March 1963. He grew up close to his birthplace in Patna, also in Bihar. There he spent his formative years at St Michael's High School. In India, *ar earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Hindu College, Delhi University in 1984. He holds two master's degrees in Linguistics and Literature from Delhi University (1986) and Syracuse University (1988) respectively. In 1993, he received his doctoral degree from the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. He lives with his family in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Work

Overview

*ar is the author of Husband of a Fanatic (The New Press, 2005 and Penguin-India, 2004), Bombay-London-New York (Routledge and Penguin-India, 2002), P*port Photos (University of California Press and Penguin-India, 2000), the book of poems No Tears for the N.R.I. (Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1996), the novel Home Products (Picador-India, 2007 and as Nobody Does the Right Thing in 2009).

His prize-winning book is A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb: A Writer’s Report on the Global War on Terror (Duke University Press, 2010; and as Evidence of Suspicion, 2009). In his review, Dwight Garner (critic) at the New York Times called it a "perceptive and soulful – if at times academic – meditation on the global war on terror and its cultural and human repercussions." It was also awarded the Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the Asian American Literary Awards.

Husband of a Fanatic was an "Editors' Choice" book at the New York Times; Bombay-London-New York was on the list of "Books of the Year" in New Statesman (UK); and P*port Photos won an "Outstanding Book of the Year" award from the Myers Program for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. His novel Home Products was short-listed for India's premier literary prize, the Vodafone Crossword Book Award.

*ar was the scriptwriter for two do*entary films: Dirty Laundry – about the national-racial politics of Indian South Africans – and Pure Chutney – about the descendants of indentured Indian labourers in Trinidad.

His academic writing and literary criticism has appeared in several journals, including Critical Inquiry, Critical Quarterly, College Literature, Race and Cl*, American Quarterly, Rethinking Marxism, Minnesota Review, Journal of Advanced Composition, Amerasia Journal and Modern Fiction Studies.

As a journalist, *ar has regularly aut*d articles for newspapers and magazines across the world such as New Statesman, The Nation, The Caravan, The Indian Express and The Hindu. In 2008, on Al Jazeera's Riz Khan Show, *ar was interviewed on the use of terror threats by governments to advance their own political agendas; the interview aired on the Al Jazeera English Network. In February 2011, *ar interviewed Indian novelist Arundhati Roy for Guernica Magazine.

*ar, Ruchir Joshi, Jeet Thayil and Hari Kunzru, were threatened with arrest for reading excerpts from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which is banned in India, at the 2012 Jaipur Literature Festival. In March 2013, *ar collaborated with Teju Cole on a text-with-photographs en*led "Who's Got the Address?"

Published works

Books

• No Tears for the N.R.I., Writers Workshop, 1996, ISBN:978-8171898930, a book of poems
• P*port Photos, University of California Press, 2000, ISBN:978-0520218161, multi-genre book on immigration and postcoloniality
• Bombay–London–New York, Routledge, 2002, ISBN:978-0415942102, literary memoir * critical report on Indian fiction
• Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate, The New Press, 2005, ISBN:978-1565849266, book on writing and religious violence
• Home Products (published in the U.S. under the *le Nobody Does the Right Thing by Duke University Press, 2010, ISBN:978-0822346708)
• A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb, Duke University Press Books, 2010, ISBN:978-0822345626, a non-fiction book about the war on terror, and the literary as well as artistic responses to it.
• A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna, Duke University Press Books, 2014, ISBN:978-0822357049
• Lunch with a Bigot: The Writer in the World, Duke University Press Books, 2015, ISBN:978-0822359111
• Immigrant, Montana, Knopf, 2018, ISBN:978-0525520757, first published in India as The Lovers, Aleph, 2017, ISBN:978-9386021007
• Every Day I Write the Book: Notes on Style, Duke University Press Books, 2020, ISBN:978-1478006275
• A Time Outside This Time, Penguin Random House, 2021, ISBN 9780593319017
• The Blue Book: A Writer's Journal, HarperCollins India, 2022, ISBN:9789354893742, a book of drawings and diary entries

Edited works

• Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, edited volume of essays.
• World Bank Literature, edited volume of essays on global economies and literature.
• The Humour and the Pity, edited volume of essays on V.S. Naipaul.
• Poetics/Politics: Radical Aesthetics for the Cl*room, edited volume of essays on radical aesthetics and pedagogy.
• Cl* Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere, edited volume of essays on radical teaching.

Forewords and introductory notes

• The Little Book of Terror, by Daisy Rockwell
• Where the Wild Frontiers Are, by Manan Ahmed.
• "Duty-Free Indians", a Foreword to Suburban Sahibs: Three Immigrant Families and their P*age from India to America by S. Mitra Kalita.
• "In Cl*", a Foreword to Cl* and Its Others, edited by J.K. Gibson-Graham.

Awards and fellowships

Most recently, *ar has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016). He has also been awarded the Lannan Foundation Marfa Residency, residency at Yaddo, a Fiction Fellowship at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, a Barach Fellowship at the Wesleyan Writers Festival, and has received awards from the South Asian Journalists *ociation for three consecutive years. In addition, he has been awarded research fellowships from the NEH, Yale University, Stony Brook University, Dartmouth College, and University of California-Riverside. A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb was also judged the Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the Asian American Literary Awards.

External links

• Official website
• New York Times review of Husband of a Fanatic
• Interview for the Wisconsin Book Festival, 2008
• Interview on blogsite "Between the Lines"
• Amitava *ar's short story "Postmortem" on NPR
• WYNC interview on The Leonard Lopate Show, 2010
• WNYC interview on the Brian Lehrer Show, 2015
• Amitava *ar on the PEN-Charlie Hebdo controversy
• Interview on Full Stop
• The Seen and the Unseen Podcast, 2022

References