Samrat Upadhyay
Quick Facts
Biography
Samrat Upadhyay (Nepali: सम्राट उपाध्याय) is a Nepalese writer who writes in English. Upadhyay is a professor of creative writing and has previously served as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University. He is the first Nepali-born fiction writer writing in English to be published in the West. He was born and raised in Kathmandu, Nepal, and came to the United States at the age of twenty-one. He lives with his wife and daughter in Bloomington, Indiana.
In 2001, Upadhyay won a Whiting Award for fiction. He was an English professor at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio before moving to Indiana in 2003.
His books specially portray the current situation in Nepal, which Upadhyay views largely though the lens of contemporary American realist fiction. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Upadhyay is "like a Buddhist Chekhov."