John P. Matthew is an Indian English writer, short story writer, poet and blogger. He was born in Kidangannoor, Kerala but was raised in the Chembur suburb of Bombay (now know as Mumbai), India. During his childhood Bombay was a city of nearly a million people and had many open spaces which have since disappeared. Therefore he prefers to call his city by its old name - Bombay - to maintain nostalgic links with its past.
John P. Matthew was born in 1957 into a family of illustrious writers in Malayalam, a language of Southern India. His great, great, great uncle George Mathan wrote the first book of Malayalam Grammar called Malayazhmayude Vyakaranam, his great uncle Puthencavu Mathan Tharakan was a writer and poet and his uncle K M Tharakan was a writer and critic. Though his uncles were writers in Malayalam he writes in his adopted language - English - as he was educated in it. He draws inspiration from expatriate Indian writers like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and Indian writers like Arundhati Roy. Writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, Donald Barthelme and poets like Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Rudyard Kipling, Shel Silverstein, Allen Ginsberg, etc. have had a profound influence on him.
Matthew’s writing centers on the urban ethos in which he was brought up. He was born in the South Indian state of Kerala in the village Kidangannoor, in the Pathanamthitta district of Kerala from which he migrated to Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) for an education. He studied in Adarsha Vidyalaya in Chembur, a suburb of Mumbai. His reading of Malayalam literature has distinctly influenced his writing, and his short stories are based on characters drawn from all different linguistic communities of India.
He has written and popularized the pidgin English spoken around Mumbai which is called “Mack English.” His poem “Mack English” published in his poetry blog is based on this hybrid form of English. An article "Mack English" has been published in the collaborative blog of the literary forum Caferati. This dialect of English has been used to portray the Mack-English-speaking community of Mumbai who mainly constitute Goans, Anglo-Indians, and East Indians (a community constituting Marathi-speaking Christians living in Mumbai).
He was editor of the magazine Ambit published by the Bombay Management Association [1]. As editor of Ambit he wrote extensively on management and related subjects. It was during this time that his first book “Success through Change,” based upon his reading of behavioral sciences was published.
His short story "Flirting in Short Messages" won a place among the top 28 short stories in a global short story contest organized by publisher Penguin India [2] and sulekha.com, an online literary website.
His short story "PK Koshy's Daily Routine" has been shortlisted for publication in the Grey Oaks Short Story Competition [3] conducted by Grey Oaks, a publishing company.
He read his poems at the Kritya International Poetry Festival held in Kerala, India. The festival was organized by Kritya Foundation [4] and was attended by poets from around the world.
He is working on two books "Mr. Bandookwala, M.B.A., Harvard [5]" a novel about a brilliant Harvard graduate and inventor of a social networking site who fails miserably as a manager in India. Coming back from the U.S. Bandookwala experience a cultural disconnect with his countrymen. According to him the novel is about the "probability of the improbable." He experience vastly improbable events in his life which disorients him and makes him suicidal: he is robbed and thrown out of a running train, he encounters an extremist in a five-star hotel's rest room but is spared a certain death because he shows him to open a fancy faucet.
A prolific and early-bird blogger (started blogging in 2003, around 2000 blog articles), he has separate blogs (web logs) dedicated to his short stories, book reviews, and poems. His main blog revolves around his thoughts, musings and everyday happenings in his life.
He lives in New Bombay with his wife, a teacher, and son.