Siddhartha Deb (born 1970) is an Indian author.
Life
He was born in Meghalaya and grew up in Shillong in northeastern India. He was educated at Calcutta University and at Columbia University, US. Deb began his career in journalism as a sports journalist in Calcutta in 1994 before moving to Delhi to continue regular journalism until 1998. His first novel, The Point of Return, is semi-autobiographical in nature and is set in a fictional hill-station that closely resembles Shillong in India's Northeast. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His second novel, Surface, also set in Northeast India, is about a disillusioned Sikh journalist. It was published in the United States as An Outline of the Republic and was shortlisted for the Hutch Crossword Award in India and long listed for the International Dublin Impac Prize.
His first non-fiction book, The Beautiful And the Damned: A Portrait of the New India was published in June 2011 by Viking Penguin and by FSG/Faber. The Indian edition of the book had to be published without its first chapter because of a defamation lawsuit by one of the subjects portrayed in the first chapter.
Deb is one of the few writers of Indian origin to be consistently critical of India's nationalism, its neoliberal development model since the 1990s, as well as of the rise of the Hindu-right political establishment. While his first two novels critique borders, nationalism, and the Indian mainstream's neo-colonial approaches to the north-eastern areas of the country, his nonfiction book was one of the few English-language books published at the time to challenge the view of India as a rising superpower with tremendous economic growth.
His latest novel The Light at the End of the World was published in 2023 and considered to be a breakthrough in form while also grappling with themes of climate change, authoritarianism, and colonialism. It has been compared in its ambitions and influences to the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Pynchon, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie, and H.P. Lovecraft. He has also contributed to The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Nation, New Statesman, Harper's, the London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. A contributing editor to the New Republic, he is an associate professor of creative writing at The New School in New York.
Awards and honors
2012 PEN/Open Book, The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India
2012 Orwell Prize (shortlist), The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India
Bibliography
Fiction
published by Picador in the UK as
a collaborative project published as a limited edition book with photographer Mitch Epstein