Upamanyu Chaterjee

Upamanyu Chatterjee, is a Bengali Indian author. Born in 1959, at Patna, Bihar, he is one of the new generation of Indo-English writers. He graduated from St. Xavier's School, Delhi, and St. Stephen's College, of the University of Delhi and joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1983. In 1990, he lived as Writer in Residence, at the University of Kent, UK. In 1998, he was appointed Director (Languages) in the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India.

Chatterjee has written a handful of short stories of which "The Assassination of Indira Gandhi" and "Watching Them" are particularly noteworthy. He is also the author of the best-selling novel, English, August : An Indian Story (subsequently made into a major film). A review in Punch described the book as "Beautifully written . English, August is a marvelously intelligent and entertaining novel, and especially for anyone curious about modern India". The novel follows Agastya Sen - a young westernized Indian civil servant whose imagination is dominated by women, literature and soft drugs. This vivid account of "real India" by the young officer posted to the small provincial town of Madna is "a funny, wryly observed account of Agastya Sen's year in the sticks", as described by a reviewer in the Observer.

His second novel, The Last Burden, appeared in 1993. This novel recreates life in an Indian family at the end of the twentieth century. It is a fascinating portrayal of the Indian middle class. The Mammaries of the Welfare State was published at the end of 2000 as a sequel to English, August and won the Sahitya Akademi Award for writing in English.

His latest novel, Weight Loss, a dark comedy, was published in 2006.