Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London, where he took his BA with First Class Honours, and completed his doctorate on critical theory and the poetry of D H Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Dervorguilla Scholar.

Amit has written four novels. The first, A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), won the first prize in the Society of Authors’ Betty Trask Awards for a first novel and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia). The second, Afternoon Raag (1993), won the Society of Authors’ Encore Prize for best second novel and the Southern Arts Literature Prize. Both books were shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. The French translation of Afternoon Raag has also been shortlisted for the Prix de la Société des gens de letters. Amit’s third novel, Freedom Song, appeared in 1998. All three of his novels were published in a single omnibus volume, Freedom Song: Three Novels, by Knopf in America in 1999. This omnibus volume was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and an Independent bestseller in America; it was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction 2000, and was one of the New York Public Library’s 25 Books to Remember, 2000. His fourth novel, A New World, won the Sahitya Akademi award 2002, India’s highest literary honour for a single book. His writing has been translated into several languages.

Amit's criticism and fiction have appeared regularly in most of the major journals in the world, including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Observer, The Spectator, Granta, the New Republic, and the New Yorker. A short film was made about him by the BBC for their ‘India Week’ on The Late Show.  He is also the editor of the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. His book of short stories, Real Time, was published in 2002, while his collection of essays, In Parenthesis: Essays on Literature and Culture, is due later. His thesis, DH Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present (2003) appeared to critical acclaim from the Clarendon Press, Oxford, with an introduction by Tom Paulin..

Amit has been a Fellow at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, on the faculty at Columbia University, and was Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Freie University, Berlin. He has given lectures and readings at various universities and institutions, including the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, the University of California, Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Wellesley College, the University of Chicago, Penn State University and Emory University.