Siddhartha Deb

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| birth_place = Shillong, Meghalaya, India

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| occupation = {{Cslist|Writer|journalist|essayist|professor}}

| language = English

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| alma_mater = Columbia University

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| awards = {{awards|PEN Open Book Award|2012|The Beautiful and the Damned}}

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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,{{cite web|title=A first-timer with a point of view...|url=http://hindu.com/thehindu/mp/2002/09/26/stories/2002092600500100.htm|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20031019151928/http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mp/2002/09/26/stories/2002092600500100.htm|url-status=dead|archive-date=19 October 2003|access-date=18 May 2014|work=The Hindu|date=26 September 2002}} 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.{{cite web|last=Sherman |first=Scott |url=http://brooklynrail.org/2011/09/express/winners-and-losers-in-the-new-indiasiddhartha-deb-with-scott-sherman |title=Winners And Losers in The 'New India': Siddhartha Deb With Scott Sherman |date=5 September 2011 |publisher=The Brooklyn Rail |access-date=23 April 2013}}

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.{{cn|date=April 2025}}

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.{{Cite magazine |last=Mickelbart |first=Stacey |date=2011-08-01 |title=Siddhartha Deb's Publishing Odyssey |language=en-US |magazine=The New Yorker |url=https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/siddhartha-debs-publishing-odyssey |access-date=2023-08-29 |issn=0028-792X}}

His latest novel The Light at the End of the World was published in 2023.{{Cite news |last=Verghese |first=Abraham |date=2023-05-30 |title=An Outsider's History of India, in a Hallucinatory Novel |language=en-US |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/books/review/siddhartha-deb-light-at-the-end-of-the-world.html |access-date=2023-08-21 |issn=0362-4331}} 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."{{cite magazine |last1=Rather |first1=Feroz |date=6 December 2023 |title=Siddhartha Deb and the Politics of Fiction |url=https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/siddhartha-deb-and-the-politics-of-fiction/ |magazine=The Nation}}

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.{{cite news | url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/books/review/bookends-columnists.html | title=Bookends: Columnists | work=The New York Times | date=3 September 2013 }} During the same period, he was also a columnist for Baffler magazine.{{cite web | url=https://thebaffler.com/latest/category/contraband | title=Contraband }}

Awards and honors

An Outline of the Republic was a finalist for the 2005 Hutch-Crossword Award (India) and was longlisted for the 2006 Impac Dublin Literary Award. It was also named Best Book of the Year by The Daily Telegraph (London) in 2005. The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India was shortlisted for the 2012 Orwell Prize and won the 2012 PEN Open Book Award. “The Mouse” was listed among “Other Distinguished Stories” in The Best American Short Stories 2012, edited by Tom Perrotta.

In 2024, Deb won the Anthony Veasna So Fiction Prize from n+1. Other honors include a 1999 Robert John Bennett Memorial Award for Best Comparative Essay from Columbia University and the 1998 Marjorie Hope Nicholson Fellowship for graduate study at Columbia. He was awarded research and writing grants from the Nation Investigative Fund in 2009, the Society of Authors in 2007, and held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University (2009–2010), the Howard Foundation at Brown University (2015–2016), and the George Orwell Foundation in London (2019). He also received residencies from MacDowell (2013), Seoul Art Space Yeonhui (2017), and the Centre for International Writers and Translators in Rhodes, Greece (2018).

Bibliography

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=Fiction=

{{cite book |title=The Point of Return |year=2003 |publisher=HarperCollins |isbn=978-0060501532 |url=https://archive.org/details/pointofreturn00sidd }}
{{cite book |title=An Outline of the Republic |year=2005 |publisher=HarperCollins |isbn=0060501553 |url=https://archive.org/details/outlineofrepubli00debs }} published by Picador in the UK as {{cite book |title=Surface.}}
{{cite book |title=Fraternity |year=2007 |publisher=Toluca Editions }} a collaborative project published as a limited edition book with photographer Mitch Epstein
{{cite book |last=Deb |first=Siddhartha |title=The Light at the End of the World |date=2023-05-30 |publisher=Soho Press |isbn=978-1-64129-466-9}}{{Cite news |last=Verghese |first=Abraham |date=2023-05-30 |title=An Outsider's History of India, in a Hallucinatory Novel |language=en-US |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/books/review/siddhartha-deb-light-at-the-end-of-the-world.html |access-date=2023-06-21 |issn=0362-4331}}{{Cite news |last=Sacks |first=Sam |date=2023-06-02 |title=Fiction: Siddhartha Deb's 'The Light at the End of the World' |language=en-US |work=The Wall Street Journal |url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/fiction-siddhartha-debs-the-light-at-the-end-of-the-world-5a95d3fc |access-date=2023-06-21 |issn=0099-9660}}{{Cite book |url=https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/siddhartha-deb/the-light-at-the-end-of-the-world/ |title=THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD |language=en}}

=Non-fiction=

{{cite book |title=The Beautiful and the Damned : Life in the New India |year=2011 |publisher=Viking Penguin |isbn=978-0865478626 }}
Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India. Haymarket Books. 2024.