David Davidar

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David Davidar is an author and publisher. He was educated at Madras (now Chennai) and Harvard University (where he obtained a diploma in publishing). In 1985, while still in his mid-twenties, he became one of the founding members of Penguin in India, where he edited or published authors like Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Khushwant Singh, R.K. Narayan, Shobhaa De, Romila Thapar, Shashi Tharoor, Suketu Mehta, William Dalrymple, Mohsin Hamid and Ramachandra Guha. In 2004 he was transferred to Penguin Books in Canada, where the authors he publishes include Philip Roth, Khaled Hosseini, John le Carré, Alice Munro (in paperback), Stuart McLean, Margaret Macmillan, Joseph Boyden, Zadie Smith, Hisham Matar, Adrienne Clarkson, Michael Ignatieff and John Ralston Saul. In the 1980s, he worked for such magazines as Gentleman, GFQ, TV & Video World, Technocrat & Business Computer.

Davidar is the author of the novel The House of Blue Mangoes , which was published in 2002. It was translated into 16 languages and was a New York Times Notable Book and a Book Sense Pick. His new novel, The Solitude of Emperors, was launched in September 2007 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. His wife, Rachna, was recently hired to manage the forthcoming Toronto location of the Winnipeg-based bookstore chain McNally Robinson. In a interview, Davidar describes Christianity in his stories and indian tradition as intertwined, and indian christianity is distinctive due to donning indian garb since its 4th century (AD) introduction.^[1]