Siddhartha Deb

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Shillong, Meghalaya, India
Occupation
  • Writer
  • journalist
  • essayist
  • professor
LanguageEnglish
Alma materColumbia University
Notable awardsPEN/Open Book
2012 The Beautiful and the Damned
Website
siddharthadeb.com Edit this at Wikidata

Siddhartha Deb (born 1970) is an Indian author.

Life

He was born in Shillong, the capital city of Meghalaya state in northeastern India. He was educated at Calcutta University and at Columbia University,[1] US. Deb began his career in journalism as a sports journalist in Calcutta in 1994 before moving to Delhi where he wrote longform features, cultural essays, and book reviews. His work included longform pieces on the drowning of 68 coal miners in present-day Jharkhand, the life of migrant workers at a spice market in Delhi, and the fate of Muslim singers who historically performed at Hindu and Sikh religious ceremonies as well at Muslim places of worship, and who were being marginalized by India's simultaneous embrace of neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism. [2] In 1998, Deb moved to New York on a graduate fellowship from the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Shortly after, he published his first novel, The Point of Return. It is semi-autobiographical in nature and set in a fictional town that closely resembles

Sikh
journalist. It was published in the United States as An Outline of the Republic and was shortlisted for the Hutch Crossword Award in India and long listed for the International Dublin Impac Prize.

His first non-fiction book, The Beautiful And the Damned: A Portrait of the New India was published in June 2011 by

Viking Penguin and by FSG/Faber. The Indian edition of the book had to be published without its first chapter because of a defamation lawsuit by one of the subjects portrayed in the first chapter.[3]

Deb is one of the few writers of Indian origin to be consistently critical of India's nationalism, its neoliberal development model since the 1990s, as well as of the rise of the Hindu-right political establishment. While his first two novels critique borders, nationalism, and the Indian mainstream's neo-colonial approaches to the north-eastern areas of the country, his nonfiction book was one of the few English-language books published at the time to challenge the view of India as a rising superpower with tremendous economic growth.

His latest novel The Light at the End of the World was published in 2023 and considered to be a breakthrough in form while also grappling with themes of climate change, authoritarianism, and colonialism. It has been compared in its ambitions and influences to the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Pynchon, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie, and H.P. Lovecraft. [4] The Kashmiri writer Feroze Rather described it in The Nation as "an enraged epic but also one full of humanity; its various epochs of bigotry, intolerance, and hate are interspersed with tender moments of solidarity, love, and compassion."[5]

Deb has contributed to

New York Times Book Review.[6] During the same period, he was also a columnist for Baffler magazine, [7] writing devastating critiques of US liberalism and its comfortable relationship with empire and Indian literary culture and its toadying up to neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism. A contributing editor to the New Republic and a prolific contributor to the books pages of Harpers, The Nation, and N+1 he has written extensively on writers including Roberto Bolaño, John Berger, Don DeLillo, Naiyer Masud, Hanya Yanagihara, and H.P. Lovecraft. He is an associate professor of creative writing at The New School in New York.[2][8]

Awards and honors

Bibliography

Siddhartha Deb talks about The Beautiful and the Damned
00:06:02
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Fiction

  • The Point of Return. HarperCollins. 2003.
    ISBN 978-0060501532
    .
  • An Outline of the Republic. HarperCollins. 2005.
    ISBN 0060501553
    . published by Picador in the UK as Surface.
  • Fraternity. Toluca Editions. 2007. a collaborative project published as a limited edition book with photographer Mitch Epstein
  • Deb, Siddhartha (30 May 2023). The Light at the End of the World. Soho Press.
    ISBN 978-1-64129-466-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) [9][10][11]

Non-fiction

Articles

See also

References

  1. ^ "A first-timer with a point of view..." The Hindu. 26 September 2002. Archived from the original on 19 October 2003. Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  2. ^ a b Sherman, Scott (5 September 2011). "Winners And Losers in The 'New India': Siddhartha Deb With Scott Sherman". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 23 April 2013.
  3. ISSN 0028-792X
    . Retrieved 29 August 2023.
  4. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 21 August 2023.
  5. ^ https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/siddhartha-deb-and-the-politics-of-fiction/
  6. ^ https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/books/review/bookends-columnists.html
  7. ^ https://thebaffler.com/latest/category/contraband
  8. ^ Siddhartha Deb (24 March 2010). "Siddhartha Deb from HarperCollins Publishers". Harpercollins.com. Retrieved 23 April 2013.
  9. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 21 June 2023.
  10. ISSN 0099-9660
    . Retrieved 21 June 2023.
  11. ^ THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD | Kirkus Reviews.

External links

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