Early life and education

Aravind Adiga was born in Madras (now Chennai) on the 23rd of October, 1974 to Dr. K. Madhava Adiga and Usha Adiga, Kannadigas both of whom hailed from Mangalore. His paternal grandfather was Late K. Suryanarayana Adiga, former chairman of Karnataka bank. He grew up in Mangalore and studied at Canara High School, then at St. Aloysius High School, where he completed his SSLC in 1990. He secured first rank in the state in SSLC. Incidentally his elder brother Anand Adiga secured 2 nd rank in SSLC and first rank in PUC in the state. . After emigrating to Sydney, Australia, with his family, he studied at James Ruse Agricultural High School. He studied English literature at Columbia College, Columbia University in New York, where he studied with Simon Schama and graduated as salutatorian in 1997. He also studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, where one of his tutors was Hermione Lee.

Career

Adiga began his journalistic career as a financial journalist, interning at the Financial Times. With pieces published in the Financial Times and Money, he covered the stock market and investment, interviewing, among others, Donald Trump. His review of previous Booker Prize winner Peter Carey's book, Oscar and Lucinda, appeared in The Second Circle, an online literary review.He was subsequently hired by TIME, where he remained a South Asia correspondent for three years before going freelance. During his freelance period, he wrote The White Tiger. He currently lives in Mumbai, India.

Booker Prize

Aravind Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Booker Prize. He is the fourth Indian-born author to win the prize, after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai. (V. S. Naipaul, another winner, is of Indian origin, but is not an Indian citizen). The five other authors on the shortlist included one other Indian writer (Amitav Ghosh) and another first-time writer (Steve Toltz). The novel studies the contrast between India's rise as a modern global economy and the lead character, Balram, who comes from crushing rural poverty.

He explained that "the criticism by writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens of the 19th century helped England and France become better societies".

Shortly after winning the prize it was alleged that Adiga had, the previous year, sacked the agent that had secured his contract with Atlantic Books at the 2007 London Book Fair. In April 2009 it was announced that the novel would be adapted into a feature film.[1] Propelled mainly by the Booker Prizer win, The White Tiger's Indian hardcover edition has sold in excess of 200,000 copies.

Between the Assassinations

Adiga's second book, Between the Assassinations, was released in India in November 2008 and in the US and UK in mid-2009. The book features 12 interlinked short stories.

Novels

• The White Tiger: A Novel: Atlantic Books, Ltd (UK), Free Press (US), 2008
• Between the Assassinations: Picador (IND), 2008

Short stories

• "The Sultan's Battery" (The Guardian, Oct 18th 2008, online text)
• "Smack" (The Sunday Times, Nov 16th 2008, online text)
• "Last Christmas in Bandra" (The Times, Dec 19th 2008, online text)
• "The Elephant" (The New Yorker, Jan 26th 2009, online text)