Indian · b. 1961
Vikram Chandra was born in New Delhi to a family in film—his mother wrote screenplays, his sisters became a director and a critic—and studied at Pomona, Johns Hopkins, and Houston before splitting his life between Mumbai and Berkeley, where he teaches. He worked as a computer programmer to pay for writing, and later published a book arguing that code and Sanskrit grammar are the same kind of beautiful object. His fiction is long, plotted, and unembarrassed about storytelling: Red Earth and Pouring Rain braids a nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian mercenary's memoir with a talking monkey, and Sacred Games spends nine hundred pages on a Mumbai police inspector and the gangster he is chasing. He won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and the Hutch Crossword Book Award. Sacred Games became Netflix's first Indian original series, which pushed his Mumbai underworld into global circulation.