Vikram Seth, (born June 20, 1952, Calcutta, India) Indian poet, novelist, and travel

writer known for his verse novel The Golden Gate (1986) and his epic novel A
Suitable Boy (1993).

The son of a judge and a businessman, Seth was raised in London and India. He
attended exclusive Indian schools and then graduated from Corpus Christi College,
Oxford (B.A., 1975). He received a masters degree in economics from Stanford
University in 1978 and later studied at Nanking (China) University. In 1987 he
returned to India to live with his family in New Delhi.

Although Seths first volume of poetry, Mappings, was published in 1980, he did not
attract critical attention until the publication of his humorous travelogue From
Heaven Lake (1983), the story of his journey hitchhiking from Nanking to New Delhi
via Tibet. The poetic craft of The Humble Administrators Garden (1985)
foreshadows the polish of The Golden Gate, a novel of the popular culture of
Californias Silicon Valley, written entirely in metred, rhyming 14-line stanzas and
based on Charles Johnstons translation of Aleksandr Pushkins Eugene Onegin. In
the work Seth successfully harnesses contemporary situations to a demanding 19thcentury form; the young professional characters discuss nuclear weapons, Roman
Catholic teachings on homosexuality, and the perils of overwork. Seth continued to
use controlled poetic form in his 1990 collection All You Who Sleep Tonight, and he
also wrote the 10 stories of Beastly Tales from Here and There (1992) in tetrametre
couplets. A collection entitled The Poems, 19811994 was published in 1995. He
turned to prose, however, in A Suitable Boy, which depicts relations between four
Indian families. The books compelling narrative and great length invited critical
comparisons to Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Honor de Balzac, and
Charles Dickens.

Biography

Born in 1952 in Calcutta, India, Vikram Seth was educated at Corpus Christi College,
Oxford, Stanford University and Nanjing University.
He has travelled widely and lived in Britain, California, India and China. His first
novel, The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse (1986), describes the experiences of a group
of friends living in California. His acclaimed epic of Indian life, A Suitable Boy (1993),
won the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner,
Best Book). Set in India in the early 1950s, it is the story of a young girl, Lata, and her
search for a husband. An Equal Music (1999), is the story of a violinist haunted by the
memory of a former lover. Vikram Seth is also the author of a travel book, From Heaven
Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet(1983), an account of a journey through Tibet,
China and Nepal that won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and a libretto, Arion and
the Dolphin: A Libretto (1994), which was performed at the English National Opera in
June 1994, with music by Alec Roth. His poetry includes Mappings (1980), The Humble
Administrator's Garden (1985), winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia), and All
You Who Sleep Tonight: Poems (1990). His children's book, Beastly Tales from Here and
There (1992), consists of ten stories about animals told in verse.
Vikram Seth's latest work is Two Lives (2005), a memoir of the marriage of his great
uncle and aunt.
Read less

Critical perspective

Bibliography

Awards

Critical perspective
It comes as a surprise to some readers of Seths A Suitable Boy (1993) that the author
of this, the longest novel in English ever written, has also penned six volumes of poetry.
What is surprising is not Seths shift between prose and poetry (here he is in the
company of several contemporary writers), but that an author famous for such an
expansive, unrestrained work of fiction, could also write with the formal and verbal
restraint, economy and discipline of Seth-the-poet.Mappings(1980) was Seths first

volume of poetry, a little known collection, it includes translations of work by Chinese,

German and Hindi poets. Through Mappings Seth served something of an
apprenticeship while revealing an early preoccupation with European and Chinese (Seth
does not see himself as a singularly Indian writer) cultural production that has, if
anything, become more pronounced in his more recent work.Mappings was followed
by From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983), a popular and
compelling autobiographical tale of the authors journey from Nepal to India and the
many and varied people he meets on the way. Travel also provides the direction for
Seths next two collections, The Humble Administrators Garden (1985) and All you who
Sleep Tonight (1990). The Humble Administrators Garden, is a witty collection of nature
poems structured around plants/places: Wutong (China), Neem (India) and Live-Oak
(California). All you who Sleep Tonight is an elegant book of poetry that combine the
sharp humour that characterises so much of Seths writing with darker subjects such as
Auschwitz and Hiroshima. In his next book of poems, Seth further displays his capacity
for wit in Beastly Tales from Here and There (1991). As its title makes explicit, this is
another narrative of journeys and journeying that takes us through Greece, China, India
and the Ukraine not to mention the fantasy world of Gup. Structured around the classic
tension between good and evil and punctuated by superb illustrations, these tales in
verse will appeal as much to children as to adults.In a more recent collection, Three
Chinese Poets (1992) Seth offers us his most ambitious and daring translation to date.
The three Chinese of the title are the Tang dynasty poets Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu.
Translated from the original ideograms (the graphic symbols of the Chinese writing
system), Seth closely follows the form and subject of the poems in what is a controlled
and skilful collection.Seths first novel - The Golden Gate - was published in 1986.
Composed of no less than 690 rhyming tetrameter sonnets (more than 7000 lines). Gore
Vidal has called it the Great California novel. The Golden Gate is a satirical romance set
in San Francisco and is centred on the relationship of two professionals.In his next
novel, A Suitable Boy Seth combined satire and romance to even greater effect in what
became one of the most popular epic narratives of the late twentieth century. This
heavy weight novel, described by one critic as three and a half pounds of perfection
has earned Seth comparison with Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. The
classic realism of A Suitable Boy, which took Seth almost a decade to write, was for
many readers of Indian fiction in English, a welcome break from the magical realism of
that other heavy weight author from the subcontinent, Salman Rushdie. Indeed Seth
describes his preferred prose style in a manner that seems to implicitly contrast him
with that of Rushdie: the kind of books I like reading are books where the authorial
voice doesnt intrude [or] pull you up with the brilliance of their sentences'. Of
course, such comparisons ultimately conceal more than they reveal: if Seths novel
represents a move away from self-conscious modernist experimentation then how are
we to read the self-conscious epigraph with which it opens: The secret of being a bore
is to say everything (Voltaire)?Set in Brahmpur, A Suitable Boy uses the taboo

relationship between a boy and girl as a metonym through which to explore the postIndependence conflict in India between Hindus and Muslims. The novel centres on four
families: the Kapoors, Mehras and Chatterjis (Hindus) and the Khans (Muslim). Mrs Rupa
Mehra is looking for a suitable boy for her wayward daughter, Lata. Suitable here
means Hindu, but Lata, it seems, has her eyes set on a Muslim boy. The repercussions of
this relationship consume one thousand three hundred and forty nine
pages.Seths novel, An Equal Music (1999, is another romantic novel, but this time
minus the satire of A Suitable Boy and a thousand or so pages. The book centres on two
gifted musicians: Michael Holme and Julia McNicholl. As Michael works on a Beethoven
piece for the Maggiore Quartet, he grows increasingly preoccupied with recollections of
his student days in Vienna where he met Julia. When the two are re-united by chance in
London, their relationship is re-kindled. One of the most impressive aspects of this novel
is the way in which it manages to convey music through language. While Seth is modest
about his musical abilities, the fact that he was commissioned to write a libretto (later
published as Arion and the Dolphin) for the English National Opera in 1994 suggests he
is no novice. An Equal Music takes a conventional romantic plot and renders it
compelling and novel through the seductive clarity and precision of its prose.
James Proctor, 2003

Bibliography
2005
Two Lives
1999
An Equal Music
1994
Arion and the Dolphin: A Libretto
1993
A Suitable Boy
1992
Three Chinese Poets: Translations of Poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu
1992
Beastly Tales from Here and There
1990
All You Who Sleep Tonight: Poems
1986
The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse
1985

The Humble Administrator's Garden

1983
From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
1980
Mappings

Awards
2001
EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award) for Best Book/Novel
1994
Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book)
1994
WH Smith Literary Award
1993
Irish Times International Fiction Prize
1985
Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia)
1983
Thomas Cook Travel Book Award