Raj Kamal Jha

Raj Kamal Jha (born 1966) is an Indian novelist and journalist.

Jha was born in Bihar and was raised in Calcutta, West Bengal, where he went to school at St. Joseph's College, Calcutta. He then attended the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur where he did his bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering, (but perhaps more significantly, had his first brush with journalism as the editor of the campus magazine, Alankar, where his first short fiction appeared).

After graduating from IIT, he went to the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he received his M.A. in 1990.

Jha was an Assistant Editor (News) at The Statesman in Kolkata, a Senior Associate Editor at India Today, New Delhi, and since 1996 has been with The Indian Express first as Deputy Editor, then as Executive Editor. He is now Managing Editor. He lives in Gurgaon.

The Indian Express has thrice won the Vienna-based International Press Institute's award for Excellence in Journalism in 2004, 2006 and 2009. Its journalists have won several national and international awards.

Jha is the author of three published novels.

His first novel, The Blue Bedspread won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia region) and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

His second novel If You Are Afraid of Heights was a finalist for the Hutch-Crossword Book Award in 2003. He has also been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Guardian First Book Award.

His third...
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