Pankaj Mishra
Pursuing high standards of literary style, Pankaj Mishra gives us new narratives about the evolution of modern Asia. He charts the journey from the Indian small town to the metropolis and rebuffs imperialist clichés with equal verve.
Pankaj Mishra is an Indian essayist, memoirist, travel writer, and novelist whose work expands our understanding of the encounter between Western and Non-western culture. His prose is distinguished by a mellifluous yet precise phrasing whose generous intelligence speaks to the general reader and specialist alike. In addition to a novel, The Romantics, he has published four works of nonfiction: Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India; An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the World; Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond; and From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. From the Ruins of Empire attempts a re-visioning of the geo-politics of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries from multiple Asian perspectives. His literary and political essays and long-form journalism regularly appear in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, The Hindu and elsewhere.
Such delightful news! As a freelancer obliged to make a living from writing, you are always scrounging for bits of time in which to write the next book, and this wonderfully generous prize will help me secure a long undistracted period.PANKAJ MISHRA