Siddhartha Deb

Siddhartha Deb (born 1970) is an Indian author.

Life
He was born in Shillong, the capital city of Meghalaya state in northeastern India. He was educated at Calcutta University and at Columbia University, US. Deb began his career in journalism as a sports journalist in Calcutta in 1994 before moving to Delhi where he wrote longform features, cultural essays, and book reviews. His work included longform pieces on the drowning of 68 coal miners in present-day Jharkhand, the life of migrant workers at a spice market in Delhi, and the fate of Muslim singers who historically performed at Hindu and Sikh religious ceremonies as well at Muslim places of worship, and who were being marginalized by India's simultaneous embrace of neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism. In 1998, Deb moved to New York on a graduate fellowship from the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Shortly after, he published his first novel, The Point of Return. It is semi-autobiographical in nature and set in a fictional town that closely resembles Shillong in India's Northeast. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His second novel, Surface, also set in Northeast India, is about a disillusioned Sikh journalist. It was published in the United States as An Outline of the Republic and was shortlisted for the Hutch Crossword Award in India and long listed for the International Dublin Impac Prize.

His first non-fiction book, The Beautiful And the Damned: A Portrait of the New India was published in June 2011 by Viking Penguin and by FSG/Faber. The Indian edition of the book had to be published without its first chapter because of a defamation lawsuit by one of the subjects portrayed in the first chapter.

Deb is one of the few writers of Indian origin to be consistently critical of India's nationalism, its neoliberal development model since the 1990s, as well as of the rise of the Hindu-right political establishment. While his first two novels critique borders, nationalism, and the Indian mainstream's neo-colonial approaches to the north-eastern areas of the country, his nonfiction book was one of the few English-language books published at the time to challenge the view of India as a rising superpower with tremendous economic growth.

His latest novel The Light at the End of the World was published in 2023 and considered to be a breakthrough in form while also grappling with themes of climate change, authoritarianism, and colonialism. It has been compared in its ambitions and influences to the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Pynchon, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie, and H.P. Lovecraft. The Kashmiri writer Feroze Rather described it in The Nation as "an enraged epic but also one full of humanity; its various epochs of bigotry, intolerance, and hate are interspersed with tender moments of solidarity, love, and compassion."

Deb has contributed to The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Nation, New Statesman, Harper's, the London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. From 2015 to 2017, Deb was a columnist for the Bookends column of the New York Times Book Review. During the same period, he was also a columnist for Baffler magazine, writing devastating critiques of US liberalism and its comfortable relationship with empire and Indian literary culture and its toadying up to neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism. A contributing editor to the New Republic and a prolific contributor to the books pages of Harpers, The Nation, and N+1 he has written extensively on writers including Roberto Bolaño, John Berger, Don DeLillo, Naiyer Masud, Hanya Yanagihara, and H.P. Lovecraft. He is an associate professor of creative writing at The New School in New York.

Awards and honors

 * 2005, Hutch-Crossword Award (India), Finalist, Surface/An Outline of the Republic
 * 2006, Impac Dublin Longlist, An Outline of the Republic
 * 2012 PEN/Open Book, The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India
 * 2012 Orwell Prize (shortlist), The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India
 * 2024 Anthony Veasna So Fiction Prize, N+1.