Manil Suri
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Manil Suri | |
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| Born | July 1959 (age 48) Mumbai, India |
| Occupation | novelist, mathematician |
| Nationality | Indian |
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Manil Suri (born July 1959) is an Indian-American mathematician and writer, most notable for his first novel, The Death of Vishnu, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2002. His latest novel is The Age of Shiva.
[edit] Biography
Suri was born in Mumbai, India, which was then known as Bombay. 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 few 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. Suri received an advance of $350,000 as a result of a bidding war between publishing houses, ultimately won by W.W. Norton.
According to an interview on the audio book version of the novel, Suri is planning to write two more novels, The Birth of Brahma and The Life of Shiva. The latter of these is scheduled to be released February 4, 2008 as The Age of Shiva. His work contains many allusions to Indian cinema and Hindu mythology. A profile of Suri appears in the January/February 2007 issue of Poets and Writers Magazine which expands on his biography and details his struggles in getting his work published.
Suri's mathematics research is in the numerical analysis of partial differential equations.
