Vikram Seth

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Vikram Seth


Born
in Calcutta (now Kolkata), West Bengal, India
June 20, 1952

Website

Genre


Vikram Seth is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist.

During the course of his doctorate studies at Stanford, he did his field work in China and translated Hindi and Chinese poetry into English. He returned to Delhi via Xinjiang and Tibet which led to a travel narrative From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983) which won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse (1986) was his first novel describing the experiences of a group of friends who live in California. A Suitable Boy (1993), an epic of Indian life set in the 1950s, got him the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

His poetry includes The Humble Administrator's
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Average rating: 4.03 · 77,019 ratings · 5,640 reviews · 56 distinct worksSimilar authors
A Suitable Boy (A Bridge of...

4.11 avg rating — 49,590 ratings — published 1993 — 108 editions
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An Equal Music

3.80 avg rating — 11,003 ratings — published 1999 — 75 editions
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The Golden Gate

3.88 avg rating — 9,007 ratings — published 1986 — 104 editions
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Two Lives

3.67 avg rating — 3,751 ratings — published 2005 — 48 editions
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From Heaven Lake: Travels T...

4.04 avg rating — 2,084 ratings — published 1983 — 40 editions
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Beastly Tales from Here and...

4.08 avg rating — 1,008 ratings — published 1992 — 23 editions
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A Suitable Boy, Vol. 1

4.17 avg rating — 937 ratings — published 1993 — 19 editions
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All You Who Sleep Tonight: ...

4.14 avg rating — 698 ratings — published 1990 — 13 editions
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A Suitable Boy, Vol. 3

4.34 avg rating — 414 ratings — published 1993 — 8 editions
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A Suitable Boy, Vol. 2

4.32 avg rating — 400 ratings — published 1995 — 18 editions
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More books by Vikram Seth…
A Suitable Boy A Suitable Girl
(2 books)
by
4.11 avg rating — 49,717 ratings

Quotes by Vikram Seth  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“God save us from people who mean well.”
Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.”
Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.”
Vikram Seth, From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet

Polls

Fourth Quarter 2014 Long Read

1862, Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, 1463 pages
 
  35 votes, 20.8%

 
  25 votes, 14.9%

1954, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1178 pages
 
  21 votes, 12.5%

1872, Middlemarch by George Eliot, 904 pages
 
  20 votes, 11.9%

 
  17 votes, 10.1%

800 BC, The Iliad by Homer, 683 pages
 
  11 votes, 6.5%

1874, The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne, 723 pages
 
  11 votes, 6.5%

1957, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, 1168 pages
 
  9 votes, 5.4%

1993, A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, 1474 pages
 
  8 votes, 4.8%

 
  5 votes, 3.0%

1996, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, 1079 pages
 
  5 votes, 3.0%

 
  1 vote, 0.6%

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