Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award.[1] His autobiographical account of his experiences in Mumbai, Maximum City, was published in 2004.[2] The book, based on two and a half years of research,[3] explores the underbelly of the city.[2]
Suketu Mehta | |
|---|---|
Mehta at the 2019 Texas Book Festival | |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable awards | Kiriyama Prize, Whiting Award |
He has won a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper’s, Time, Newsweek, The New York Review of Books[4] and Scroll.in,[5] and has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, and NPR's All Things Considered. Mehta has also written original screenplays for films, including New York, I Love You (2008) and Mission Kashmir (2000) with novelist Vikram Chandra.
His latest book This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto, was published in June 2019[6] under a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. A forthright defense of immigrants, both legal and illegal, in the wake of colonialism, the book argued that "the West has forced people to become migrants. The right to migrate is overdue reparation for those centuries of degradation and exploitation."[7]
Personal life
editMehta was born in Kolkata, India, to Gujarati parents and raised in Mumbai, where he lived until his family moved to the New York area in 1977.[2][8] He is a graduate of New York University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.[2]
Mehta is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University[9] and lives in Manhattan with his wife Darshana Narayanan.
He was previously married to Sunita Vishwanathan who is the director of ' Hindus for human rights'.
Awards
editThis section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources. (May 2019) |
- He won a Whiting Award in 1997.
- He won the O. Henry Prize for his short story Gare du Nord published in Harper's Magazine in 1997.
- He won a Fellowship of the New York Foundation for the Arts.[when?]
- He won a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship.
- 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for the book Maximum City.
- Maximum City was also chosen as one of the books of the year 2004 by The Economist.
- Maximum City won the 2005 Kiriyama Prize.
Works
edit- Mehta, Suketu (15 August 2013). "In the Violent Favelas of Brazil". The New York Review of Books. 60 (13).
- Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. Knopf. 2004. ISBN 978-0-67004-921-9.
- This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. ISBN 978-0-37427-602-7[10]
Filmography
editThis section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources. (May 2019) |
As writer
edit| Year | Film | Director | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | Mission Kashmir | Vidhu Vinod Chopra | |
| 2008 | 8 | Mira Nair | Segment "How Can It Be?" |
| New York, I Love You | Segment 2 |
See also
editReferences
edit- ^ "Whiting.org".
- ^ a b c d "A Writer's Return to Bombay after 20 Years". Fresh Air Archive: Interviews with Terry Gross. 6 December 2004. Retrieved 2022-07-24.
- ^ "Observer review: Maximum City by Suketa Mehta". TheGuardian.com. 6 February 2005.
- ^ Mehta, Suketu (August 15, 2013). "In the Violent Favelas of Brazil". The New York Review of Books.
- ^ Mehta, Suketu (October 20, 2019). "Around the world, there's a battle of storytelling about migrants and Muslims. Populists are winning". Scroll.in.
- ^ This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 4 June 2019.
- ^ "Immigration as reparation for colonialism, climate change and corporate greed". The Washington Post. 21 June 2019.
- ^ Neill, Daniel (February 19, 2005). "You can't go home again". The Spectator.
- ^ "Suketu Mehta". New York University. Retrieved 28 August 2020.
- ^ Nayar, Mandira (29 December 2018). "Truth and dare A politically charged year will see equally charged non-fiction reads". The Week. Retrieved 14 March 2019.
External links
edit- Suketu Mehta, official web site.
- Profile at The Whiting Foundation
- Interview with the Wall Street Journal
- Interview in The Believer magazine by Karan Mahajan
- Interview with Venkatesan Vembu, Daily News & Analysis
- Lettre Ulysses Award Biography (broken link as of 27 Oct 2012)
- SAJAforum on his NYU appointment