Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. His autobiographical account of his experiences in Mumbai, Maximum City, was published in 2004. The book, based on two and a half years of research, explores the underbelly of the city. He has won a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper’s, Time, Newsweek, The New York Review of Books and Scroll.in, and has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, and NPR's All Things Considered. Mehta has also written original screenplays for films, including New York, I Love You (2008) and Mission Kashmir (2000) with novelist Vikram Chandra. His latest book This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto, was published in June 2019 under a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. A forthright defense of immigrants, both legal and illegal, in the wake of colonialism, the book argued that "the West has forced people to become migrants. The right to migrate is overdue reparation for those centuries of degradation and exploitation."

Personal life

Mehta was born in Kolkata, India, to Gujarati parents and raised in Mumbai, where he lived until his family moved to the New York area in 1977. He is a graduate of New York University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Mehta is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University and lives in Manhattan with his wife Darshana Narayanan. He was previously married to Sunita Vishwanathan who is the director of ' Hindus for human rights'.

Awards

Works

Filmography

As writer