Rana Dasgupta

Born in Canterbury, United Kingdom, Rana Dasgupta has lived in the United States, India, and France. His work includes Tokyo Cancelled (2005), a collection of contemporary folktales, and a novel, Solo (2009), which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (2010). In 2014, he published his first nonfiction work, Capital: The Eruption of Delhi, an exhilarating blend of literary reportage and intimate oral history. This portrait of India’s capital, and the dizzying transformation it underwent at the turn of the twenty-first century, won the Ryszard Kapuściński Award (2017) and the Prix Émile Guimet (2017). It features lush descriptions of the daily lives of Delhi’s elite, and an unfiltered view of the precarious existence of the city’s underclass. With a strong sense of the universality of history and storytelling, Dasgupta’s work has become ever more engaged with the grand forces acting on people in our era of globalization. His clear-eyed observation of 21st-century crises lies at the heart of his highly anticipated forthcoming book, After Nations (2025), which explores the dissipation of the powers of the nation-state and seeks ways for us to navigate the resulting confusion. As an essayist, Dasgupta has contributed to distinguished outlets such as Harper’s, Granta, and The New Statesman. For several years, he taught a course on 21st-century culture and ideas at Brown University. His lectures on the nation-state, and the possibilities beyond it, have been hosted by the Berggruen Institute, the Serpentine Gallery, the House of World Cultures, and elsewhere.