Suketu Mehta

Suketu Mehta was born in Calcutta in 1963, grew up partly in Bombay and partly in New York after his family emigrated when he was 14, and returned to Bombay with his wife and children in 1998 for the three years that became Maximum City (2004).

The book is enormous in its scope — it follows gangsters and police, bar dancers and Hindu nationalists, Bollywood directors and slum dwellers — and remarkable in its access. Mehta spent months with a man who had killed 17 people for the Bombay underworld, accompanying him on his daily life and eventually understanding the logic of a world that outsiders see only as incomprehensible.

He was uniquely positioned for the project: Bombay-born but American-educated, fluent in Hindi but thinking in English, a returning native who could see the city with both insider knowledge and outsider freshness. The book is the definitive literary account of what a megacity actually is — not as an abstraction but as a lived experience for the twenty million people who inhabit it.

This Land Is Our Land (2019) is a work of political argument — a case for immigration that draws on his own experience of moving between India and America, and on the global history of human migration. It shows a writer willing to move beyond the personal narrative to make a public argument.