Aravind Adiga

Biography:

Aravind Adiga was born on October 23, 1974, in Madras (now Chennai) to Dr. K. Madhava Adiga and Usha Adiga of Mangalore. His maternal great-grandfather was U. Rama Rao, a well-known Madras-based physician and Congress leader, and his paternal grandpa was K. Suryanarayana Adiga, a former chairman of Karnataka Bank

A native of Mangalore, Adiga attended Canara High School before continuing his education at St. Aloysius College in Mangaluru, where he earned his SSLC in 1990.

Aravind attended James Ruse Agricultural High School after moving to Sydney with his family. Later, he studied English literature under Simon Schama at Columbia College of Columbia University in New York City, where he graduated in 1997 as salutatorian. Hermione Lee was one of his professors at Oxford’s Magdalen College, where he also studied.

Aravind Adiga interned at the Financial Times before starting his journalism career. He wrote about investing and the stock market in articles that appeared in Money and Time.

He conducted an interview with future US President Donald Trump in 2003. He relocated from New York to New Delhi later that year to serve as Time’s South Asia correspondent. In a 2017 interview, he explained: “Being a journalist afforded me a path to go back to India.

After three years, he relocated to Mumbai and started working as a freelance writer. The Second Circle, an online literary review, published his critique of Oscar and Lucinda, a former Booker Prize winner.

Adiga began writing The White Tiger, his debut novel, shortly after leaving his job at Time. The book was published in March 2008 and went on to win the Booker Prize that same year. Following Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai, he is the fourth author of Indian descent to receive the prize. More than 200,000 copies of The White Tiger’s Indian hardcover edition were sold, primarily thanks to the Booker Prize victory.