Neel Mukherjee (writer)

Neel Mukherjee, FRSL (born 1970) is an Indian English-language writer based in London. He is the author of several critically acclaimed novels. He is also the brother of the television anchor and editor Udayan Mukherjee.

His first novel, Past Continuous, won the Vodafone-Crossword Book Award in 2008 and several more awards when republished in the U.K. in 2010 as A Life Apart. His second novel, The Lives of Others, was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

Life
Mukherjee was educated at Don Bosco School, Park Circus, Kolkata. He studied English at Jadavpur University and then attended University College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he studied English and graduated in 1992. He completed his Ph.D. at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

He reviews fiction for a variety of publication in the UK and US, including The Times and Time Asia.

Describing the unexpected ease with which he wrote The Lives of Others, he said of the process: "'Writers rarely have access to that part of their heads where books originate. One can talk cogently of influences, plotting, putting a book together, structuring, editing, everything, really, but origins are a far cloudier issue, the domain of the unconscious, mostly, so not readily available for truthful discussion.... I don't know whether my book started life as the story of a joint family in Calcutta at a critical juncture in history or as a reckoning with an ultra-left movement for social justice and equality around which the domestic story was built.... That way of talking about a book as which narrative came first is always already too late because the origins lie far earlier.... It was as if the book had already been there, waiting patiently to be let in; I only had to open the door.'"

Past Continuous or A Life Apart
Published in India by Picador in January 2008 as Past Continuous. Republished in the U.K. by Constable in January 2010 as A Life Apart
 * 2008 Vodafone Crossword Book Award, English Fiction
 * 2009 GQ (India) Writer of the Year Award
 * 2011 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature shortlist
 * Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction
 * "the saga of a lonely young gay man who flees a miserable life in Kolkata to the freedom of Britain"

The Lives of Others
Published in May 2014
 * 2014 Encore Award from the Royal Society of Literature for the best second novel
 * 2014 Man Booker Prize shortlist
 * 2016 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature shortlist

Set in Calcutta in 1967. Idealistically motivated Supratik has become associated with extremist political activism. He disappears, leaving only a note. The life and fortunes of the family he has left behind take a disastrous turn, mirrored in the society around them.

A State of Freedom
The prologue was published in Granta 130.