Manil Suri was born in Bombay in 1959 and is a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland. His first novel, The Death of Vishnu, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, nominated for the PEN Faulkner Award, the LA Times Book Award and the WH Smith Book Award. It won the Barnes & Noble 2001 Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction. Manil Suri was an inaugural winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. He is also the author of The Age of Shiva (Bloomsbury, 2008).