Rohinton Mistry

Mistry grew up in a Parsi family in Bombay and emigrated to Toronto in his early twenties, working for years as a bank clerk while studying English and philosophy part-time at night. He began writing short fiction almost by accident, entering a Canadian literary contest, and his early stories drew on the shrinking, tight-knit Parsi community he'd left behind.

A Fine Balance (1995), his best-known novel, follows a widow and two Dalit tailors thrown together with a student boarder in one Bombay apartment during Indira Gandhi's 1975–77 Emergency, when civil liberties were suspended and forced sterilization campaigns swept the poor. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and selected for Oprah's Book Club, it established him internationally as a chronicler of ordinary lives crushed by state power.

He has published sparingly since, continuing to live and write in Canada.