Hari Kunzru

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Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru (born 1969) is the British author of The Impressionist and Transmission. Of mixed English and Kashmiri Pandit ancestry, he grew up in Essex. He studied English at Wadham College, Oxford University, then gained an MA in Philosophy and Literature from Warwick University.

He has worked as a travel journalist since 1998, writing for such newspapers as The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, and was travel correspondent for Time Out magazine. In 1999 he was named The Observer Young Travel Writer of the Year. From 1999-2004 he was also music editor of Wallpaper* magazine and since 1995 he has been a contributing editor to Mute, the culture and technology magazine. He won the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award for The Impressionist. Transmission, his second novel, was published in the summer of 2004. In 2005 he published the short story collection "Noise".

In 2003, Hari Kunzru was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Although he was also awarded The John Llewellyn Rhys prize for writers under 35, the second oldest literary prize in the UK, he turned it down on the grounds that it was backed by the Mail on Sunday whose "hostility towards black and Asian people" he felt was unacceptable. In a statement read out on his behalf, he stated "As the child of an immigrant, I am only too aware of the poisonous effect of the Mail's editorial line.... The atmosphere of prejudice it fosters translates into violence, and I have no wish to profit from it." He further went on to recommend that the award money be donated to the charity Refugee Council (UK). He sits on the executive of English PEN.