Tabish Khair

Tabish Khair is a poet, journalist, critic, educator and novelist. Shortlisted for the Encore Prize and the Crossword Award and winner of the All India Poetry Prize, he has been awarded academic fellowships and scholarships at various univesities, including Copenhagen University, Jamia Milia Islamia University, Delhi University and the University of Cambridge. 

After about four years as a staff reporter in Delhi, Khair left for Copenhagen, Denmark, to do a PhD, which he completed in 2000. It was published as Babu Fictions and has since become one of the important secondary texts on Indian English fiction. In 2000, Khair also published a collection of poems, ‘Where Parallel Lines Meet’ (Penguin), which is considered to be “one of the most significant collections in recent years by an Indian writing in English.” It included poems for which he had won the prestigious All India Poetry Prize.

Khair’s second novel The Bus Stopped was shortlisted for the Encore Award and his new novel, The Thing about Thugs has been shortlisted for the Hindu Best Fiction Prize. His other publications include the co-edited anthology, Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing (2006) and the study, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (2009).