Samrat Upadhyay, The First Nepali Writer in the West

Samrat Upadhyay is a renowned author of Nepalese origin in the United States and works as the Martha C. Kraft Professor of Humanities at Indiana University, Bloomington. He was born in Kathmandu and emigrated to the US when he was 21. He completed his doctorate from the University of Hawaii in 1999.

Upadhyay is the first author born in Nepal whose work has been published in the Western world. He won the Whiting Writers’ Award for his first book ‘Arresting God in Kathmandu’, a collection of short stories which was published in the year 2001 and subsequently translated into French and Greek. His first full-length novel ‘The Guru of Love’ was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2003 and has been translated into several European languages.

Upadhyay’s story collection, ‘The Royal Ghosts’ won the 2007 Asian American Literary Award, the Society of Midland Authors Book Award, and was declared the Best of Fiction in 2006 by the Washington Post. His latest novel, ‘The City Son’, was shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award.

Upadhyay explores universal themes through his works and is very popular among the younger generation. He directs Indiana University’s Creative Writing program which is ranked among the best in the nation. He was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowship in creative writing in 2015.