Vikram Chandra Biography and latest books by Vikram Chandra

Vikram Chandra (born in India, 1961) is an Indian writer who has penned two novels and a collection of short stories. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the coveted 1996 Commonwealth Writers\' Prize for Best First Book.

Chandra is married to writer Melanie Abrams, who also teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. Chandra shuttles between Mumbai, India and Oakland, California. He is often mistaken for his namesake Vikram A Chandra, who is a journalist and has authored The Srinagar Conspiracy.

Chandra was born in New Delhi in 1961. His father, Navin Chandra, is a retired executive and his mother, Kamna Chandra, has written several Hindi films and plays. Her most notable works include Bollywood films like, Prem Rog, 1942: A Love Story and Chandni. One of Vikram’s sisters, Tanuja Chandra, is a filmmaker and screenwriter who has directed critically acclaimed films, like Sur and Sangharsh. His other sister, Anupama Chopra, is a noted film critic and consulting editor for NDTV.

Education

Chandra studied at Mayo College in Ajmer, Rajasthan, and went to St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai. As an undergraduate student, he moved to the US and graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, California, with a B.A. magna cum laude in English (Creative Writing). Chandra then went to film school at Columbia University, leaving halfway through to write his first novel. He received his M.A. from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He then went on to teach at George Washington University, and lectured at University of California, Berkeley.

Works

Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Chandra\'s first novel, was inspired by James Skinner’s autobiography, who is a legendary nineteenth century Anglo-Indian soldier. The novel was written over several years at the writing programs at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston. Red Earth and Pouring Rain received terrific critical acclaim, and it bagged the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. The novel is named after a particular poem from the Kuruntokai, an anthology of Classical Tamil love poems.

Love and Longing in Bombay is a collection of short stories that was published in 1997. This collection of stories won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region) and was also short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize.

In 2000, Vikram worked 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 and Preity Zinta.

Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra\'s most recent novel, was published in 2006. Set in Mumbai, it features Sartaj Singh, a policeman who from Love and Longing in Bombay. Over 900 pages long, Sacred Games was one of the year\'s most anticipated novels.

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