Vikram Seth (born 20 June 1952) is an Indian novelist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for A Suitable Boy (1993), a novel of more than 1,300 pages set in the India of the early 1950s, and for The Golden Gate, a novel written entirely in sonnets. Few writers of his generation have worked in so many forms: fiction, verse, memoir, travel, libretto and translation.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Vikram Seth |
| Born | 20 June 1952, Calcutta |
| Age | 74 |
| Education | The Doon School; Tonbridge School; Corpus Christi College, Oxford (PPE); Stanford University; Nanjing University |
| Occupation | Novelist, poet |
| Notable works | From Heaven Lake, The Golden Gate, A Suitable Boy, An Equal Music, Two Lives |
| Awards | Sahitya Akademi Award (1988), Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (1994), Padma Shri (2007), Pravasi Bharatiya Samman (2005) |
| Parents | Prem Nath Seth and Justice Leila Seth |
Early Life
He was born in Calcutta, the eldest of three children. His father, Prem Nath Seth, was an executive of the Bata shoe company. His mother, Leila Seth, studied law while bringing up her children, came first in the London bar examination, and went on to be the first woman judge of the Delhi High Court and the first woman Chief Justice of a state High Court in India. The family moved between Batanagar, London, Patna and Delhi.
Education
He was at the Doon School in Dehradun, where he edited the school magazine and, by his own account, was unhappy. He finished school at Tonbridge in England and read philosophy, politics and economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
He went to Stanford University in California to take a doctorate in economics. His subject was the economic demography of Chinese villages, and from 1980 to 1982 he studied at Nanjing University. He never finished the thesis; he had become a writer.
Career
Travel and verse
On his way home from China in 1981 he hitch-hiked through Xinjiang and Tibet to Nepal and India. His account of the journey, From Heaven Lake (1983), won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. Collections of poems followed, among them The Humble Administrator’s Garden and All You Who Sleep Tonight, written in rhyme and metre when little other poetry was.
The Golden Gate
The Golden Gate (1986) is a novel about a group of young professionals in San Francisco, told in 590 sonnets in the stanza of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Even the contents page and the dedication are sonnets. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1988.
A Suitable Boy
He returned to his parents’ house in Delhi and spent some eight years writing A Suitable Boy. Its central question is whom a young woman, Lata Mehra, will marry, and around it he built a portrait of four families and of a newly independent country: land reform, the first general election, Hindu–Muslim tension, courtesans, shoemakers and university politics. It was published in 1993 and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. A television adaptation directed by Mira Nair was shown by the BBC in 2020.
A sequel, A Suitable Girl, has been promised for many years.
Later books
- An Equal Music (1999), a love story set among the members of a London string quartet
- Two Lives (2005), a memoir of his great-uncle, an Indian dentist who lost an arm in the Second World War, and his German-Jewish wife
- Beastly Tales from Here and There, fables in verse
- Three Chinese Poets, translations of Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu
- a libretto, Arion and the Dolphin, and a verse translation of the Hanuman Chalisa (2024)
Public Stands
He has written and spoken against the criminalising of homosexuality in India. When the Supreme Court restored the old law in 2013 he appeared on a magazine cover holding a placard reading “Not a criminal”.
Personal Life
He divides his time between Delhi and England, where in 2003 he bought the Old Rectory at Bemerton near Salisbury, once the home of the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert. He is a trained singer of Hindustani classical music and practises Chinese calligraphy. His brother Shantum is a Buddhist teacher and his sister Aradhana a film-maker.
Featured image: Vikram Seth in Oxfordshire, July 2009. Photo by Amrhelweh, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
