Амитава Кумар: Индийский писатель и журналист

Indian writer and journalist (born 1963)

Amitava Kumar (born 17 March 1963) is an Indian writer and journalist who is Professor of English, holding the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College.

Kumar was born in the city of Arrah in the Indian state of Bihar on 17 March 1963. He grew up close to his birthplace in Patna, also in Bihar. He attended St Michael's High School. In India, Kumar earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Hindu College, Delhi University in 1984. He holds two master's degrees in Linguistics and Literature from Delhi University (1986) and Syracuse University (1988) respectively. In 1993, he received his doctoral degree from the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His wife Mona Ali is an economics professor at SUNY New Paltz. Kumar lives with his family in Poughkeepsie, New York. As a professor at Vassar College, Kumar has made significant connections in the writing and journalism world. Kumar served as a mentor to journalist Kelly Stout andAlanna Okun, a senior editor at Vox, while they were students at Vassar. The death of Kumar's parents had a significant effect on the content of his writing. He reminisced on his father and ancestors in a 2022 article for the wire. In a 2024 article for Lit Hub, he compared experiencing the death of his father to various literary accounts of death, like in Blake Morrison's memoir When Did You Last See Your Father?.

Kumar is the author of Husband of a Fanatic (The New Press, 2005 and Penguin India, 2004), Bombay London New York (Routledge and Penguin India, 2002), Passport Photos (University of California Press and Penguin India, 2000), the book of poems No Tears for the N. R. I. (Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1996), the novel Home Products (Picador India, 2007 and as Nobody Does the Right Thing in 2009). His prize winning book is A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb: A Writer’s Report on the Global War on Terror (Duke University Press, 2010; and as Evidence of Suspicion, 2009). In his review, Dwight Garner (critic) at the New York Times called it a "perceptive and soulful – if at times academic – meditation on the global war on terror and its cultural and human repercussions." In February 2011, Kumar interviewed Indian novelist Arundhati Roy for Guernica Magazine. Kumar, Ruchir Joshi, Jeet Thayil and Hari Kunzru, were threatened with arrest for reading excerpts from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which is banned in India, at the 2012 Jaipur Literature Festival. In March 2013, Kumar collaborated with Teju Cole on a text with photographs called "Who's Got the Address?" Kumar's most recent novel, My Beloved Life, was published in 2024 to positive review.

Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, edited volume of essays. World Bank Literature, edited volume of essays on global economies and literature. The Humour and the Pity, edited volume of essays on V. S. Naipaul. Poetics/Politics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom, edited volume of essays on radical aesthetics and pedagogy. Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere, edited volume of essays on radical teaching.

Kumar was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. He has also been awarded the Lannan Foundation Marfa Residency, residency at Yaddo, a Fiction Fellowship at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, a Barach Fellowship at the Wesleyan Writers Festival, and has received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association for three consecutive years. In addition, he has been awarded research fellowships from the NEH, Yale University, Stony Brook University, Dartmouth College, and University of California Riverside.