Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Manil Suri was born in July, 1959 in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay). He
spent several years of his life acquiring degrees in mathematics (B.Sc. (1979),
University of Bombay; M.S. (1980) and Ph.D. (1983), Carnegie-Mellon University)
followed by several years climbing the academic ladder as a mathematics
professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (assistant
(1983–89), associate (1989–94), full professor (1994–present). This is
the only job he has ever had, and he is amazed to wake up and discover (on most
days) that he still likes it.
He claims that writing has been a way for him to escape the horror of being a
mathematician. (It is rumored he also complains frequently to his colleagues of
the horror of being a writer, declaring mathematics to be his only escape.) He
wrote his first short story in 1985 and spent the next ten years finding out how
wanting was that initial attempt. During that time he wrote maybe seven more
stories, dabbled in some informal writers' groups and even started a novel about
a Pittsburgh woman and her transvestite son, thankfully abandoned after five
chapters. One year, he spent weeks polishing up two or three of his best pieces
and sent them out to thirty or forty literary journals. For his efforts, he was
rewarded with the obligatory thirty or forty rejection slips. Typical acceptance
rates even for obscure journals being 5% and lower, he is relieved he sought
tenure in math, not creative writing.
In 1995, he did have his first story, "The Tyranny of Vegetables,"
published. Unfortunately, it was in a Bulgarian-language journal and he was only
able to identify it by an author photograph next to the piece. He thinks the
name of the journal is Orpheus, but as he is unable to read the title of
the complimentary copy that came from Bulgaria, he cannot be sure.
He started The Death of Vishnu as a short story in 1995. It was
inspired by the death of an actual man named Vishnu who had lived (and died) on
the steps of the Bombay apartment building in which he grew up. By 1997, it had
grown to three chapters, and he took it to a workshop at the Fine Arts Work
Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts led by Michael Cunningham. Cunningham
began his critique with the exhortation to "keep writing this at any
cost" and ended it with "you must do whatever is necessary to finish
this." That's when Suri realized that perhaps the time for dabbling had
come to an end, perhaps he had stumbled onto the start of something more
serious. Three years later, an excerpt, "The Seven Circles" appeared
in The New Yorker, bringing in his first non-Bulgarian audience.
In addition to Michael Cunningham, Suri has taken writing workshops with two
other wonderful teachers: authors Jane Bradley and Vikram Chandra. He has been a
fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the MacDowell Colony,
and was the winner of the 1998 Jenny McKean Moore Residency Fellowship awarded
biannually by George Washington University.
Manil Suri's avocational interests include painting and cooking, which he
claims are the only respites from the horror of being a mathematician and a
writer.
Manil Suri's website
This bio was last updated on 07/09/2016. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
I’m Michael Cunningham, and I have the privilege of talking to
Manil Suri about his remarkable first novel, The Death of Vishnu. Who are
some of your literary influences? Do you identify yourself particularly as an
Indian writer?
Both of these questions are kind of loaded questions, because
first of all I’m never quite clear in my mind what is meant by a literary
influence. How do you interpret that?
I would say, any piece of writing that stays with you, and in some
way influences the kind of writer you are, whether it be Henry James or
Jacqueline Susann, both of whom I claim as influences.
OK, well that’s good, because I certainly grew up on a lot of
Jacqueline Susann-type novels. But more serious writers I would have to say, the
one that comes to mind is V. S. Naipaul. I’ve just read one book of his, A
House for Mr. Biswas, and the thing that stayed with me out of that novel was
the way his characters speak. And they speak in English, but you can tell they
are speaking an Indian language. It’s their intonation, or, I don’t know how
he does it, and that’s certainly something I would love to be able to do. So
that’s something that definitely did stay with me. I’ve ...
Aravind Adiga is the author of The White Tiger, which was awarded the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Last Man in Tower, and a collection of stories, Between the Assassinations. He was born in India and attended Columbia and Oxford ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Death of Vishnu
Try:
The White Tiger
by Aravind Adiga
Sonny Brewer is the author of the novels, The Poet of Tolstoy Park, A Sound Like Thunder, Cormac - The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing, and The Widow and the Tree. Brewer also edited the anthology series Stories from the Blue Moon... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Death of Vishnu
Try:
The Poet of Tolstoy Park
by Sonny Brewer
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