Amit Chaudhuri
- Prizes judged
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer and music composer.
Friend of My Youth is Chauduri’s seventh and most recent novel. Among his other works are three books of essays; a study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry; a book of short stories, Real Time; a work of nonfiction, Calcutta: Two Years in the City; and two volumes of poetry, including Sweet Shop.
A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the awards he has received for his fiction include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Indian government’s Sahitya Akademi Award.
Born in Bombay in 1962 and brought up in Calcutta, he studied at University College, London and Balliol College, Oxford. He was made Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfenden College, Oxford. Chaudhuri lives in Calcutta and the United Kingdom, where he is a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia.
Background
Between 2005 - 2015, the Man Booker International Prize recognised one writer for their achievement in fiction.
Worth £60,000, the prize was awarded every two years to a living author who had published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.
The winner was chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel and there were no submissions from publishers.
The Man Booker International Prize was different from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlighted one writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. In focusing on overall literary excellence, the judges considered a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.