Amitava Kumar Universal

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Name: Amitava Kumar
City/Place: Poughkeepsie, New York
Country: United States
Hometown: Patna, India

Life & Work

Bio: Amitava Kumar is a writer and journalist. He was born in Ara, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes. Kumar is the author of several books of non-fiction and two novels. He lives in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College. In 2016, Amitava Kumar was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (General Nonfiction) as well as a Ford Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists.

Kumar’s latest book is Immigrant, Montana: A Novel, published by Faber in the UK, Knopf in the US, and in translation by other publishers worldwide. It was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times, a book of the year by The New Yorker, and listed by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2018. The book came out in India under the title The Lovers: A Novel.

Kumar is the author of Lunch With a Bigot (Duke University Press, 2015, and Picador India, 2015); A Matter of Rats (Duke University Press, 2014 and Aleph Book Company, 2013), A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb (Duke University Press, 2010; also published as Evidence of Suspicion, Picador India, 2010); Nobody Does the Right Thing (Duke University Press, 2010; also published as Home Products, Picador India, 2007); Husband of a Fanatic(The New Press, 2005 and Penguin-India, 2004), Bombay-London-New York (Routledge and Penguin-India, 2002), and Passport Photos (University of California Press and Penguin-India, 2000). His forthcoming nonfiction is entitled Every Day I Write the Book, also appearing in the Indian subcontinent as Writing Badly Is Easy.

Lunch with a Bigot was included in a list of “ten best books of 2015 published by university presses”; A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb was adjudged the best nonfiction book of the year by the Page Turner Awards in 2011; in 2007, Home Products was short-listed for India’s premier literary award, the Crossword Award; Husband of a Fanatic was an “Editors’ Choice” book at the New York Times; Bombay-London-New York was on the list of “Books of the Year” in The New Statesman (UK); and Passport Photos won an “Outstanding Book of the Year” award from the Myers Program for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.

Kumar has edited five books: Class Issues (New York University Press, 1997), Poetics/Politics (St Martin’s Press, 1999), World Bank Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), The Humour and the Pity: Essays on V.S. Naipaul (Buffalo Books and British Council, 2002), and Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate (Routledge and Penguin-India, 2003).

Amitava Kumar’s non-fiction and poetry has been published in The New York Times, Granta, NPR, The Nation, New Yorker.com, Harper’s, Bookforum, The Guardian, Kenyon Review, Vanity Fair, Guernica, New Statesman, Transition, American Prospect, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Toronto Review, Colorlines, Biblio, Outlook, Frontline, India Today, The Hindu, Himal, Herald, The Friday Times, The Times of India and a variety of other venues. He is the script-writer and narrator of the prize-winning documentary film, Pure Chutney (1997). In 2013, Amitava Kumar collaborated with Teju Cole on an ekphrastic project entitled “Who’s Got the Address?”

Kumar’s academic writing has appeared, among other places, in the following journals: Critical Inquiry, Cultural Studies, Critical Quarterly, College Literature, Race and Class, American Quarterly, Rethinking Marxism, Minnesota Review, Journal of Advanced Composition, Amerasia Journal and Modern Fiction Studies.

He has been awarded writing residences by Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Norman Mailer Writing Center, Writers Omi at Ledig House, and the Lannan Foundation. He has also been a Barach Fellow at the Wesleyan Writers Festival; he has received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association for three consecutive years, and been the recipient of research fellowships from the NEH, Yale University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Dartmouth College, and University of California-Riverside.

Contact Information

Email: [email protected]
Management/Booking: Amitava Kumar is represented by the literary agency David Godwin Associates Ltd.

Media | Markets

▶ Book Purchases: http://www.amitavakumar.com/books/
▶ Twitter: amitavakumar
▶ Website: http://www.amitavakumar.com
▶ Articles: http://www.amitavakumar.com/articles/

Quotes, Notes & Etc. On Immigant, Montana

“a bold and provocative counter-narrative… We live in a world of #MeToo; this novel fearlessly unmasks some great men, making political stalwarts and revolutionaries stumble down from their pedestals.”
—The Guardian

“As cerebral as it is sensual… Immigrant, Montana is intelligent, melancholy, quirky. At a time when feelings run high over which immigrants get to call themselves American, Kailash’s idiosyncratic voice adds a welcome tonic note to the debate.”
—Boston Globe

“… Immigrant, Montana is razor-sharp, told meditatively and youthfully, and is just as entertaining as it is serious.”
—PEN America

“…consistently surprising and hilarious… This novel is an inventive delight…”
—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review.)

“an intelligent and intimate novel”
—The Millions

“thought-provoking”
—Entertainment Weekly

“There is originality in Kumar’s use of the autofictional mode, a form which coheres nicely with the novel’s overarching message; in particular, the issue of how migrants are forced to fictionalize about, and to, themselves. This is not to mention, of course, the grotesquerie of state authorities demanding accounts of ‘sufficient’ depredation as a prerequisite for treating migrants with basic dignity… a rich, allusive exploration of immigration and selfhood.”
—Totally Dublin

“Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana is a beguiling meditation on memory and migration, sex and politics, ideas and art, and race and ambiguity. Part novel, part memoir, this book is as sly, charming, and deceptive as its passionate protagonist, a writer writing himself into being.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana is romantic, natural, gorgeously detailed, and painfully truthful about exile, grad school, sex and the South Asian man. Few novels have captured the mental texture of immigration so accurately.”
—Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs

Amitava Kumar’s new novel brings to mind W. G. Sebald’s work, but Kumar has a deeper curiosity in the borderless-ness of storytelling as a confrontation to all kinds of borders imposed upon his characters by the external and the artificial, as we see more and more in today’s world. Audacious in its scope yet with refreshing attention to detail, Immigrant, Montana is one of those novels that, with each rereading, a reader will unlock another treasure box of joy.
—Yiyun Li, author of Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life

There is a buoyant energy and hilarity to this account of an Indian student seeking the wide world through the women he meets, but one laughs with growing unease as a darker undercurrent is slowly revealed. An unusual, brave twist on the migrant’s tale.
—Kiran Desai, winner of the Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, winner of the Booker Prize

Immigrant, Montana is a delight.
—Hanif Kureishi, author of Intimacy and other novels

In Immigrant, Montana, Amitava Kumar pushes at the boundaries of the novel in the best way— reminiscent of Ben Lerner and John Berger—to open up a completely new, thrilling exploration of a particular immigrant experience, one that is fearlessly cosmopolitan and witty in its natural appropriation of cultural materials.

This is a deeply American novel, one that delves into the messiness of love (and sex!), and the meeting point between identity, character, place, and the constant cultural stuff floating around. I was reminded, strangely, reading it, not only of our contemporary explorers—Teju Cole and Ben Lerner and Lydia Davis—but also … Philip Roth, and so many others who had the skill and talent and, above all, the humor to do whatever was necessary to delve into the lives of their characters, even if it meant breaking with traditions and incorporating new ways of using the materials of the culture: we are, their work says, not only internal beings struggling for love and meaning in our lives, but also complex amalgamation of cultural and historical information. Above all, Kumar’s novel was uproariously funny and deeply moving.
—David Means, author of Hystopia