Suketu Mehta

Suketu Mehta
Mehta at the 2019 Texas Book Festival
Mehta at the 2019 Texas Book Festival
NationalityAmerican
Notable awardsKiriyama Prize,
Whiting Award

Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award.[1] His autobiographical account of his experiences in Mumbai, Maximum City, was published in 2004.[2] The book, based on two and a half years of research,[3] explores the underbelly of the city.[2]

He has won a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper’s, Time, Newsweek, The New York Review of Books[4] and Scroll.in,[5] and has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, and NPR's All Things Considered. Mehta has also written original screenplays for films, including New York, I Love You (2008) and Mission Kashmir (2000) with novelist Vikram Chandra.

His latest book This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto, was published in June 2019[6] under a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. A forthright defense of immigrants, both legal and illegal, in the wake of colonialism, the book argued that "the West has forced people to become migrants. The right to migrate is overdue reparation for those centuries of degradation and exploitation."[7]

  1. ^ "Whiting.org".
  2. ^ a b "A Writer's Return to Bombay after 20 Years". Fresh Air Archive: Interviews with Terry Gross. 6 December 2004. Retrieved 2022-07-24.
  3. ^ "Observer review: Maximum City by Suketa Mehta". TheGuardian.com. 6 February 2005.
  4. ^ Mehta, Suketu (August 15, 2013). "In the Violent Favelas of Brazil". The New York Review of Books.
  5. ^ Mehta, Suketu (October 20, 2019). "Around the world, there's a battle of storytelling about migrants and Muslims. Populists are winning". Scroll.in.
  6. ^ This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 4 June 2019.
  7. ^ "Immigration as reparation for colonialism, climate change and corporate greed". The Washington Post. 21 June 2019.