Manil Suri was born and raised in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. He came to the United States as a student when he was twenty. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland (when not visiting Mumbai) and is a citizen of both the United States and India.

Suri’s first published fiction in English was The Seven Circles, a short story that appeared in The New Yorker on Valentine’s Day, 2000. The Death of Vishnu, his first novel, debuted worldwide in India on January 6, 2001. In addition to being published by W. W. Norton in the United States and Bloomsbury in the UK, the novel has been translated into twenty-two foreign languages. Suri was named by Time magazine as a “Person to Watch” in 2000, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction in 2004.

“Writing The Death of Vishnu led me to Hindu mythology and to the great philosophical works of India like the Bhagwad Gita,” Suri says. “It helped me reconnect with a spiritual side of myself that had been dormant for a long time.” Working on The Age of Shiva was also a voyage of discovery. “With this book, I immersed myself in modern India. I understood what enormous challenges have been met since independence, and what a tremendous bond I have with the country of my birth. It is a source of joy to me that my book is being released in India’s anniversary year of six decades of independence.” An August 2007 essay entitled “What Unites India?” published in the sixtieth independence-day anniversary issue of India Today can be accessed here.

In addition to being a writer, Suri is also a mathematician. He obtained his PhD in applied mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University and is a tenured full professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). “Ever since Vishnu was a success, people have been asking me whether I am going to quit mathematics. The answer is no. It took me seven years to write my second novel, and having another profession ensured I went only modestly crazy.” While Suri still does mathematical research in the field of numerical analysis, he has been spending more time devising ways to bring mathematics to the public at large. “Many people like mathematics while in school, but then have no further opportunity to enjoy it. It’s not like art, for which you can go to a museum to satisfy a craving. I’d like to help push mathematics into the cultural arena. Perhaps even put a mathematician on Oprah.” The most successful of his popularizing projects has been the presentation Taming Infinity, which he even presented at the 2006 International Literature Festival Berlin. This and other outreach efforts can be accessed through his academic website. (See in particular an excerpt of his short story about mathematicians, The Tolman Trick.)