Manil Suri is an Indian-American mathematician and writer, most notable for his first novel, The Death of Vishnu, which was long-listed for the 2001 Booker Prize, short-listed for the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize that year. His latest novel is The Age of Shiva. Suri was born in Bombay , India, the son of R.L. Suri, a Bollywood music director, and a schoolteacher. He attended the University of Bombay before moving to the United States, where he attended Carnegie Mellon University. He received a Ph. D. in mathematics in 1983, and became a mathematics... professor at UMBC . He still continues to hold this job even though he is more notable as a writer, and has risen through the academic ranks of the university. Suri began writing short stories in the 1980s during his spare time, but none were published. In 1995 he began writing The Death of Vishnu, a novel about social and religious tensions in India taking place in an apartment building in contemporary Mumbai.
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