Rana Dasgupta

Rana Dasgupta
200px Author Rana Dasgupta at home in Delhi, April 2010 (photo: Nina Subin)
Born	Rana Dasgupta (1971-11-05) 5 November 1971 Canterbury, England
Occupation	Novelist, essayist
Nationality	British
Website
www.ranadasgupta.com

Rana Dasgupta (born 5 November 1971 in Canterbury, England) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He grew up in Cambridge, England, and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and, as a Fulbright Scholar, the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has lived in Delhi, India, since 2001. In 2010 The Daily Telegraph called him one of Britain's best novelists under 40. In 2014 Le Monde named him one of 70 people who are making the world of tomorrow.

Career

Dasgupta's first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (HarperCollins, 2005), was an examination of the forces and experiences of globalisation. Billed as a modern-day Canterbury Tales, it is about thirteen passengers stuck overnight in an airport who tell thirteen stories from different cities in the world, stories that resemble contemporary fairytales, mythic and surreal. The tales add up to a broad exploration of 21st-century forms of life, which includes billionaires, film stars, migrant labourers, illegal immigrants and sailors. Tokyo Cancelled was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

Dasgupta's second novel, Solo (HarperCollins, 2009), was an epic tale of the 20th and 21st centuries told from the perspective of a 100-year-old Bulgarian man. Having achieved little in his 20th-century life, he settles into a long and prophetic daydream of the 21st century, where all the ideological experiments of the old century are over, and a collection of startling characters – demons and angels – live a life beyond utopia. A reviewer described it as "unfazed by the 21st century, confidently tracing the wrong turnings of the past 100 years, soaring insightfully over the mess of global developments that constitute the quagmire of today". Solo was translated into twenty languages.

Dasgupta was awarded the prestigious Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the novel Solo; it won both the region and overall best-book prize

His third book, Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First-Century Delhi (Canongate, 2014), is a non-fiction exploration of his adopted city of Delhi, and, in particular, the changes and personalities brought about there by globalization.

Academic appointments

Dasgupta gives occasional lectures at Brown University; in Spring 2014 he was appointed Distinguished Visiting Lecturer and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of Modern Culture and Media.

In October 2012, Dasgupta was Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton University.

Bibliography

Novels

• Tokyo Cancelled (2005)
• Solo (2009)

Non-fiction

• Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First-Century Delhi (2014)

Essays

• "Maximum Cities" (New Statesman, 27 March 2006)
• "Capital Gains" (Granta 107, summer 2009)
• "Writing into the unknown" (Nagledna+, 2013)

External links

• New Statesman article by Rana Dasgupta on the rise of the Third-World city
• Granta essay by Rana Dasgupta about Delhi's new rich
• "Rana Dasgupta", Writers Online, Brown University.