Amit Chaudhuri is the author of five novels, of which the most recent is the Immortals, and numerous works of non-fiction, most recently Calcutta: Two Years in the City and Telling tales. He has recevied several awards such as the Commonwealth Writer'Prize, the UK's Society of Authors' Betty Trask Award for best first novel and Encore Prize for Fiction, the Sahitya Akademi Award,and most recently the Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution to liberty studies and the West Bengal government's Rabinder Puraskar for his writing on Tagore. He was made fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009 and was also one of the judges for the Man Booker International Prize 2009. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.
Calcutta is Amit Chaudhuri's account of two years in the city. Using the 2011 elections as his fulcrum, Chaudhuri evokes all that is most particular and extraordinary about the city-from its houses with their slatted windows to its effervescent cultural life and its pujas and Christmas. He paints too an acute, and often ironic, picture of life in the city today-of its malls, restaurants, its middle class
who leave and then return reluctantly, and of its itinerant poor. Lyrical, brilliantly observed, and profound, Calcutta is one of the finest books ever written on the city.
