admin on 01 Sep 2008
About
Amitava Kumar (click here for cv) is a writer and journalist born in Ara, Bihar; he grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes. Currently, he is Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College.
Kumar is the author of Husband of a Fanatic (The New Press, 2005 and Penguin-India, 2004), Bombay-London-New York (Routledge and Penguin-India, 2002), and Passport Photos (University of California Press and Penguin-India, 2000). He has also written a book of poems, No Tears for the N.R.I. (Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1996). The novel Home Products was published in early 2007 by Picador-India, and has recently appeared in the US under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing. In early 2010, Picador-India brought out his book Evidence of Suspicion which was later published by Duke University Press under the title, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. In his review of this book in the New York Times, Dwight Garner called it a “perceptive and soulful” meditation on “the cultural and human repercussions” of the global war on terror.
Husband of a Fanatic was an “Editors’ Choice” book at the New York Times; Bombay-London-New York was on the list of “Books of the Year” in The New Statesman (UK); and Passport Photos won an “Outstanding Book of the Year” award from the Myers Program for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. His novel Home Products was short-listed for India’s premier literary prize, the Crossword Book Award. A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb received the 2011 Page Turner award for nonfiction from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
Kumar serves on the editorial board of several publications and co-edits the web-journal Politics and Culture. He has edited five books: Class Issues (New York University Press, 1997), Poetics/Politics (St Martin’s Press, 1999), World Bank Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), The Humour and the Pity: Essays on V.S. Naipaul (Buffalo Books and British Council, 2002), and Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate (Routledge and Penguin-India, 2003).
Amitava Kumar’s non-fiction and poetry has been published in The Nation, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, New Statesman, Boston Review, Transition, American Prospect, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Toronto Review, Colorlines, Biblio, Outlook, Frontline, India Today, The Hindu, Himal, Herald, The Friday Times, The Times of India and a variety of other venues. He is the script-writer and narrator of the prize-winning documentary film, Pure Chutney (1997)(watch excerpt here), and also the more recent Dirty Laundry (2005).
Kumar’s academic writing has appeared, among other places, in the following journals: Critical Inquiry, Cultural Studies, Critical Quarterly, College Literature, Race and Class, American Quarterly, Rethinking Marxism, Minnesota Review, Journal of Advanced Composition, Amerasia Journal and Modern Fiction Studies.
He has been a Fiction Fellow at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, a Barach Fellow at the Wesleyan Writers Festival, and has received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association for three consecutive years. In addition, he has been awarded research fellowships from the NEH, Yale University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Dartmouth College, and University of California-Riverside.
Kumar is represented by the literary agency Aitken Alexander Associates.
Please click here to download Amitava Kumar’s cv as a Word file.
