Upamanyu Chatterjee

Upamanyu Chatterjee () (born 1959) is an Indian Bengali author and administrator, notable for his work set in the milieu of the Indian Administrative Service, especially his novel English, August. He was born in Patna, Bihar and was educated at St. Xavier's School and St. Stephen's College, in Delhi. He joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1983.

Major works

Chatterjee has written a handful of short stories of which "The Assassination of Indira Gandhi" and "Watching Them" are particularly noteworthy. His best-selling novel, An Indian story (subsequently made into a major film), was published in 1988 and has since been reprinted several times. A review in Punch described the book as "Beautifully written … English, August is a marvelously intelligent and entertaining novel, and especially for anyone curious about modern India". The novel follows Agastya Sen - a young westernized Indian civil servant whose imagination is dominated by women, literature and soft drugs. This vivid account of "real India" by the young officer posted to the small provincial town of Madna is "a funny, wryly observed account of Agastya Sen's year in the sticks", as described by a reviewer in The Observer.

His second novel, The Last Burden, appeared in 1993. This novel recreates life in an Indian family at the end of the twentieth century. The Mammaries of the Welfare State was published...
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