Tabish Khair


Tabish Khairis an Indian English author and associate professor in the Department of English, University of Aarhus, Denmark. His books include Babu Fictions, The Bus Stopped, which was shortlisted for the Encore Award and The Thing About Thugs, which has been shortlisted for a number of prizes, including the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Man Asian Literary Prize. His poem Birds of North Europe won the First Prize in the Sixth The Poetry Society Competition held in 1995.

Biography

Born and educated mostly in Gaya, India, Khair's honours and prizes include the First Prize in the Sixth The Poetry Society Competition held in 1995, an honorary fellowship for creative writing from the Baptist University of Hong Kong, fellowships at new Delhi's universities and a by-fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge University, UK. He is currently based in Denmark.
Other Routes, an anthology of travel writing by Africans and Asians, was edited by Khair. Khair's Encore shortlisted novel, The Bus Stopped, has already appeared in French, Italian and Portuguese. His novel Filming is set against the backdrop of the Partition of India and the 1940s Bombay film industry. It has been greeted with acclaim: "...in keeping with Khair's pertinent and thought-provoking musings on self-deception". An excerpt of the novel has been anthologised in Ahmede Hussain's The New Anthem: The Subcontinent in its Own Words. In June 2008, it was shortlisted for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award in India. Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry.
Khair's study The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness was released by Palgrave in the UK and US in the winter of 2009. His latest novel, set in Victorian London, The Thing About Thugs, was published by Harper Collins in summer 2010 and has been shortlisted for The Hindu Best Fiction Award, short-listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2012, and short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. It is scheduled to appear in translation in Brazil, Italy, Russia and France in 2012. Khair's works have been translated into various languages; the Danish translation of Filming: A Love Story was shortlisted for Denmark's top translation/literature award and the French translation of The Bus Stopped was listed for a major French translation prize.
Previously a journalist with the Times of India, Khair continues to write and review for publications in India, UK, Denmark and other places, in particular for the Hindu. His latest novel is the critically acclaimed How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, released in India in 2012 and due elsewhere in 2013.