Stephen Alter

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Stephen Alter is an author of more than 20 books of fiction and non-fiction. He was born in

He has written extensively on natural history, folklore and mountain culture, particularly in his travel memoir Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage to the Many Sources of the Ganga. Educated at Woodstock School and Wesleyan University, Alter has taught at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, where he was director of the writing program for seven years. Following this, he was a writer-in-residence at MIT for ten years.

Among the honours he has received are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the East West Centre in Hawaii, and the Banff Centre for Mountain Culture.

His most recent novel is Death in Shambles: A Hill Station Mystery (Aleph 2023) and his latest non-fiction book, is The Cobra's Gaze: Exploring India's Wild Heritage (Aleph 2024). Alter also carries an Overseas Citizenship of India.^[1]

Selected titles

Non-Fiction

• All the Way to Heaven: An American Boyhood in the Himalayas (1998)
• Amritsar to Lahore: A Journey Across the India-Pakistan Border (2000)
• Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage Up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture (2001)
• Elephas Maximus: A Portrait of the Indian Elephant (2004)
• Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief (2007)
• Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime (2014)
• Wild Himalaya: A Natural History of the Greatest Mountain Range on Earth (2019)
• The Cobra's Gaze: Exploring India's Wild Heritage (2024)

Fiction

• Neglected Lives (1979)
• Silk and Steel (1980)
• The Godchild (1988)
• Renuka (1990)
• Aripan & Other Stories (2005)
• The Rataban Betrayal (2013)
• In the Jungles of the Night: A Novel about Jim Corbett (2016)
• The Dalliance of Leopards (2017)
• Feral Dreams: Mowgli and His Mothers (2020)
• Birdwatching: a novel (2022)
• Death in Shambles: A Hillstation Mystery (2023)

For Young Readers

• The Phantom Isles (2007)
• Ghost Letters (2008)
• The Secret Sanctuary (2015)
• The Cloudfarers (2018)

Editor

• The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories (2001)
• The Corbett Papers (with Akshay Shah) (2022)

References