Manil Suri
PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers
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 and Noble Discover Prize that year. His latest novel is The Age of Shiva. Suri was born in Bombay , India. 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 the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. 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. An excerpt "The Seven Circles" appeared in The New Yorker and the novel was published in 2001, becoming an international bestseller.
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