Hari Kunzru
“These days we’re all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - People are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives.”
Hari Kunzru made his debut with The Impressionist, a spellbinding novel described in Salon as a “picaresque tale of a boy, half English and half Indian, and his adventures in his homeland and Britain in the early years of the 20th century.” Since then, he has amassed a critically acclaimed body of work in the form of the novels Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, White Tears, and most recently Red Pill which the Wall Street Journal called "an absorbing parable of contemporary paranoia . . . Mr. Kunzru has always paired his sharp, elegant prose with visions of pandemonium . . . Current events, he suggests, illustrate the madness of the world more effectively than any literary device.”
Kunzru has also published Noise, a short story collection, and Memory Palace, a novella. He is the winner of the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award from the Society of Authors, as well as the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. He has been named a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2017, he was named to the panel of judges for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. He is the host of the podcast Into The Zone, from Pushkin Industries
“Kunzru can rival . . . any current novelist with the strength of his prose and imaginative boldness.” —The Wall Street Journal
Born in London to an Indian father and English mother, Kunzru writing “explore[s] the controversial legacies of colonialism and empire and the impact of today’s globalized world on the formation of individual identities,” (Luca Prono). His singular perspective and innovative storytelling on the page have translated to readings and interviews at top-tier festivals and reading series around the world. His fiction and non-fiction appear in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the novelist Katie Kitamura.