Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra in Leipzig (March 2014)
Born	1969 (age 47–48) Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, India
Nationality	India
Known for	The Romantics An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the World Age of Anger (2017)
Awards	2000 Art Seidenbaum award for Best First Fiction 2013 Crossword Book Award (nonfiction) 2014 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize
Website	www.pankajmishra.com

Pankaj Mishra (Paṅkaja Miśrā; born 1969, Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, India) is an Indian essayist and novelist. He is a recipient of the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction.

Mishra graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce from Allahabad University before earning his Master of Arts degree in English literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

In 1992, Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), was a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the context of globalisation. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfilment in cultures other than their own, was published in 11 European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His 2004 book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia. According to Mishra, his most recent work, From the Ruins of Empire (2012), examines the question of "how to find a place of dignity for oneself in this world created by the West, in which the West and its allies in the non-West had reserved the best positions for themselves."