Vikram Seth (born 20 June 1952) is an Indian novelist and poet. He has written several novels and poetry books. He has received several awards including Padma Shri, Sahitya Akademi Award, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, WH Smith Literary Award and Crossword Book Award. Seth's collections of poetry such as "Mappings" and "Beastly tales", are notable contributions to the Indian English language poetry Canon.


== Background ==
Vikram Seth was born on 20 June 1952 to Leila. He spent part of his childhood in Patna since his parents were posted there for a while. He attended St. Xavier's High School.
Seth spent part of his youth in London and returned to India in 1987. He received primary education at Welham Boys' School and then moved to The Doon School. While at Doon, Seth was the editor-in-chief of The Doon School Weekly. After graduating from The Doon School in India, Seth went to Tonbridge School, England to complete his A-levels, where he developed an interest in poetry and learned Chinese. After obtaining a degree from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Seth moved to California to work on a graduate degree in economics at Stanford University. He then went on to study creative writing at Stanford and classical Chinese poetry at Nanjing University in China.
Having lived in London for many years, Seth now maintains residences near Salisbury, England, where he is a participant in local literary and cultural events, having bought and renovated the house of the Anglican poet George Herbert in 1996, and in Jaipur, India.
In 2006, he became a leader of the campaign against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a law against homosexuality. Leila Seth, his mother wrote about Seth's sexuality and her coming to terms with it in her memoir.
His younger brother, Shantum, leads Buddhist meditational tours. His younger sister, Aradhana, is a filmmaker married to an Austrian diplomat and has worked on Deepa Mehta's movies Earth and Fire. (Compare the characters Haresh, Lata, Savita and two of the Chatterji siblings in A Suitable Boy: Seth has been candid in acknowledging that many of his fictional characters are drawn from life; he has said that only the dog Cuddles in A Suitable Boy has his real name "Because he can't sue". Justice Leila Seth has said in her autobiography On Balance that other characters in A Suitable Boy are composites but Haresh is a portrait of her husband Prem.)


== Career ==
Seth detailed in an interview (in the year 2005) in the Australian magazine Good Weekend that he has studied several languages, including Welsh, German and, later, French in addition to Mandarin, English (which he describes as "my instrument" in answer to Indians who query his not writing in his native Hindi, which he reads and writes in the Devanagari script) and Urdu, which he reads and writes in Nasta'liq script. He plays the Indian flute and the cello and sings German lieder, especially Schubert.
Seth's former literary agent Giles Gordon recalled being interviewed by Seth for the position:

Vikram sat at one end of a long table and he began to grill us. It was absolutely incredible. He wanted to know our literary tastes, our views on poetry, our views on plays, which novelists we liked.

Seth later explained to Gordon that he had passed the interview not because of commercial considerations, but because unlike the others he was the only agent who seemed as interested in his poetry as in his other writing. Seth followed what he has described as "the ludicrous advance for that book" (PS250,000 for A Suitable Boy) with PS500,000 for An Equal Music and PS1.4 million for Two Lives. He prepared an acrostic poem  for his address at Gordon's 2005 memorial service.


== Bibliography ==


=== Novels ===
The Golden Gate (1986)
A Suitable Boy (1993)
An Equal Music (1999)
A Suitable Girl (upcoming, 2016)


=== Poetry ===
Mappings (1980)
The Humble Administrator's Garden (1985)
All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990)
Beastly Tales (1991)
Three Chinese Poets (1992)
At Evening (1993)
The Frog and the Nightingale (1994)
A Doctor's Journal Entry
Summer Requiem: A Book of Poems (2012)


=== Childrens' book ===
Beastly Tales from Here and There (1991)


=== His Expressions ===
From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983)
Two Lives
The Rivered Earth


== Awards ==
1983 - Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
1985 - Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) for The Humble Administrator's Garden
1988 - Sahitya Akademi Award for The Golden Gate
1993 - Irish Times International Fiction Prize (shortlist) for A Suitable Boy
1994 - Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) for A Suitable Boy
1994 - WH Smith Literary Award for A Suitable Boy
1999 - Crossword Book Award for An Equal Music
2001 - EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award) for Best Book/Novel for An Equal Music
2005 - Pravasi Bharatiya Samman
2007 - Padma Shri in Literature & Education
2013 - The 25 Greatest Global Living Legends In India


== See also ==


== References ==

Chaudhuri, Amit (ed.). "Vikram Seth (b. 1952)." The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. New York: Vintage, 2004:508-537.


== External links ==
The Telegraph(Love split delayed Suitable Boy sequel)
Vikram Seth fan website
Literary Encyclopedia biography
Emory biography
Contemporary Writers Biography
Vikram Seth at the Internet Movie Database
1999 BBC audio interview with Vikram Seth
"Poetic License" by Cynthia Haven, "Stanford Magazine," May/June 1999
video interview with Vikram Seth
1990 BOMB Magazine interview with Vikram Seth by Ameena Meer