Background

Raj Kamal Jha was born in 1966, in Bhagalpur, India. He was raised in Calcutta, West Bengal.

Education

Jha attended school at St. Joseph's College. He then attended the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, where he got his Bachelor of Technology with Honours in Mechanical Engineering. He also studied at the University of Southern California, Graduate School of Journalism, where he received a master's degree.

Career

Raj Kamal Jha is Chief Editor of the daily newspaper The Indian Express, which has won the International Press Institute's Award for Excellence in Journalism three times.

Jha's first novel, The Blue Bedspread, won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia) 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. His third novel, Fireproof, debuted in German at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2006 and topped CNN-IBN's list of best books of the year. His novels have been published in over a dozen languages.

His fourth novel She Will Build Him A City was published by Bloomsbury in India, Australia, UK and US and by Actes Sud in French. It was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2016.

His latest novel The City And The Sea, published by Penguin Hamish Hamilton in 2019, "cleaves open India's tragedy of violence against women with a powerful story about our complicity in the culture that supports it."

Jha was a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley where he taught a course on reporting on India.

Achievements

• Jha's novels have been translated into more than a dozen European languages, including French, German, Italian, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, Spanish and Finnish. His short stories have appeared in French and German anthologies as well. His work has been featured in several international literary festivals, including Hay-on-Wye, Munich Writers' Festival, Berlin International Literature Festival, Ubud Readers and Writers Festival in Bali, Frankfurt Book Fair, Jaipur Literature Festival, Melbourne Writers' Festival, and the Los Angeles Times Book Festival.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The City and the Sea

    (The novel opens India's tragedy of violence against women...)

    2019
  • If You Are Afraid of Heights

    (A new novel about family, fantasy and love Amir, Mala, an...)

    2003
  • The Blue Bedspread

    (A midnight phone call awakens a man to inform him that hi...)

    2001
  • She Will Build Him a City

    (As night falls in Delhi, a mother spins tales from her pa...)

    2015
  • Fireproof

    (February 2002. A helpless nation watches as the city of A...)

    2007

Views

Called the "novelist of the newsroom," Jha's fiction, marked by its stark simplicity and ability to evoke emotion through attention to detail, is strongly grounded in contemporary themes around change in India, often taking off from newspaper pages. From domestic violence to the urban-rural divide, from inequality to intolerance, violence against women and those on the margins, Jha's books engage with disturbing subjects unusual in contemporary Indian fiction in English. His writing, simple as it appears, calls for a lot of reader participation which evokes sharp, divided reaction.

Connections

Raj Kamal Jha is married to Sujata Bose. They have one son called Rain Jha.

Spouse:

Sujata Bose

Son:

Rain Jha

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001