Upamanyu Chatterjee

Upamanyu Chatterjee উপমন্যু চট্টোপাধ্যায়
Upamanyu Chatterjee at a reading in New Delhi
Born	1959 Patna, Bihar, India
Occupation	author
Nationality	Indian
Ethnicity	Bengali
Alma mater	St. Xavier's School, Delhi, St. Stephen's College, Delhi
Genre	Novel

Upamanyu Chatterjee (Bengali: উপমন্যু চট্টোপাধ্যায়) (born 1959) is an Indian civil servant who currently serves as Secretary to Government of India on the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board. He is a 1983 batch Indian Administrative Service officer from Maharashtra Cadre.

He is a published author and best known for his novel English, August, also adapted into an acclaimed film of the same title.

Chatterjee has written a handful of short stories of which "The Assassination of Indira Gandhi" and "Watching Them" are particularly noteworthy. His best-selling novel, English, August : An Indian story (subsequently made into a major film), was published in 1988 and has since been reprinted several times. A review in Punch described the book as "Beautifully written … English, August is a marvelously intelligent and entertaining novel, and especially for anyone curious about modern India". The novel follows Agastya Sen – a young westernised Indian civil servant whose imagination is dominated by women, literature and soft drugs. This vivid account of "real India" by the young officer posted to the small provincial town of Madna is "a funny, wryly observed account of Agastya Sen's year in the sticks", as described by a reviewer in The Observer.

His second novel, The Last Burden, appeared in 1993. This novel recreates life in an Indian family at the end of the twentieth century. The Mammaries of the Welfare State was published at the end of 2000 as a sequel to English, August. His fourth novel, Weight Loss, a dark comedy, was published in 2006. His fifth was Way To Go, a sequel to The Last Burden published in 2010. His most recent work is Fairy Tales at Fifty, published in 2014, another kind of dark comedy that combines the fantasy of fairy tales and reality.