Vikram Seth

Seth studied economics at Oxford and Stanford, and detoured into unlikely literary fame with The Golden Gate (1986), a novel about young professionals in San Francisco written entirely in Pushkin-style sonnet stanzas, a formal stunt few others would have attempted, let alone pulled off. He drew on his own travels through Tibet and China for the earlier travelogue From Heaven Lake.

A Suitable Boy (1993) took nearly a decade to write and became, at the time, one of the longest single-volume novels published in English: a mother's search for the right husband for her daughter, unfolding into a vast social panorama of newly independent India's politics and religion, deliberately modeled on the scale of Tolstoy and Trollope.

He has continued to move between poetry, translation, and fiction, including a long-promised, long-delayed sequel, A Suitable Girl, still unpublished decades after it was announced.