Vikram Chandra

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vikram Chandra, is an emerging Indian writer who has won awards and critical acclaim for his novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, and a collection of short stories, Love & Longing in Bombay.

Born in New Delhi in 1961, he schooled at Mayo College in Ajmer, Rajasthan, and did his college at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai. Vikram came to the United States as an undergraduate student, where he graduated from Pomona College (in Claremont, California with a magna cum laude BA in English, with a concentration in creative writing.

He then attended film school at Columbia University in New York. In the Columbia library, by chance, he happened upon the autobiography of James Skinner, a legendary nineteenth century Anglo-Indian soldier. This book was to become the inspiration for Vikram’s novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain. He left film school halfway to begin work on the novel.

Red Earth and Pouring Rain was written over several years at the writing programs at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston. It was published in 1995 by Penguin Books in India; by Faber and Faber in the UK; and by Little, Brown in the United States. The book was received with outstanding critical acclaim. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction.

A collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, was published in 1997 by the same publishers and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region); was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize; and has been well received by international press and media.

In 2000, Vikram served as co-writer, with Suketu Mehta, for Mission Kashmir, a Bollywood movie directed by his brother-in-law, the award-winning director Vidhu Vinod Chopra and starring Hrithik Roshan.

Vikram hails from a creative family, his mother Kamna Chandra has written several Hindi films and plays, notable ones being Prem Rog and 1942: A Love Story. His sister, Tanuja Chandra, is a director and screenwriter, who has directed several films including Sur and Sangharsh. His other sister Anupama Chopra is a film critic and senior correspondent for India Today; she has written Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, a BFI book about the hugely popular 1995 hit. Her first book, Sholay: The Making of a Classic, won the Swarn Kamal, a national award for the best Indian book on cinema in 1995. Vikram's father, Navin Chandra, is a retired executive.

Vikram Chandra's most recent novel Sacred Games, set amongst the cops and villains in a sprawling Mumbai, was published in 2006. It features the character Sartaj Singh, who first appeared in Chandra's 'Love and Longing in Bombay'. 900 pages long, 'Sacred Games' was one of the year's most anticipated new novels, and was the subject of a bidding war amongst the leading publishers in India, the UK and the US.

Vikram is married to writer Melanie Abrams. He currently divides his time between Mumbai and Oakland, California. He and his wife both teach creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley.