Suketu Mehta, India

Writer and Journalist, * 1963
Maximum City. Bombay Lost and Found

“I think there is a global hunger for learning about megacities, Bombay in particular. People know it's special but they don't know how so. I'm hoping that this book will be as much of a revelation to Bombayites as it is to others. I like to think that it reads like a good novel rather than urban history. It's a group of interrelated stories and what's links them all is my own story and my quest to go home again.”

Suketu Mehta was born in Calcutta and grew up in Bombay/Mumbai. In 1977 his family moved to New York, where his father worked in diamond trading. Mehta studied at New York University and has also lived in London and Paris, as well as in Iowa, while attending the Writers´ Workshop. In 1998 he moved with his wife – who was born in India and raised in London – and his children back to Bombay/Mumbai.

He had already made this decision to return in 1996, when during a stay in Bombay/Mumbai he witnessed the clashes between Hindus and Muslims, and decided to write a book about the city. Maximum City. Bombay Lost and Found was published in 2004. This personal portrait of the megalopolis surprises and fascinates with its intimate descriptions of individuals and the unusual perspective from which Mehta reports. He meets gangsters, politicians, fanatics, film stars, prostitutes and street kids and through these encounters gets to know the wonders and the horrors of this huge city.

In 2005 Maximum City won the Kiriyama Prize for Non-Fiction, which was established to recognise outstanding books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia. The book was also one of the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the General Non-Fiction category.  Mehta won the Whiting Writers Award in 1997 for emerging writers and in 1998 he was awarded the O. Henry Prize for short stories. That year he was also named a Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Mehta co-wrote the screenplay for Mission Kashmir (2000), a Bollywood drama, based in the world of the police; he reports about the on-location shooting of the film in Maximum City.

Suketu Mehta works as a journalist for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Harper’s, Time, and The Village Voice. He was a guest lecturer in 2004 at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa, which he had himself already attended.

He is currently writing a screenplay for The Goddess, to be directed by Ismail Merchant, in which Tina Turner is to play the lead as a Buddhist goddess (Shakti).

Suketu Mehta lives with his family in Bombay/Mumbai.