Neel Mukherjee (writer)

Mukherjee was educated at Don Bosco School, Park Circus, Kolkata. He studied English at Jadavpur University and then attended University College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he studied English and graduated in 1992. He completed his Ph.D. at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and graduated with an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in 2001.

He reviews fiction for a variety of publication in the U.K. and U.S., including The Times and Time Asia.[1]

Describing the unexpected ease with which he wrote The Lives of Others, he described the process:[2]

"Writers rarely have access to that part of their heads where books originate. One can talk cogently of influences, plotting, putting a book together, structuring, editing, everything, really, but origins are a far cloudier issue, the domain of the unconscious, mostly, so not readily available for truthful discussion.... I don't know whether my book started life as the story of a joint family in Calcutta at a critical juncture in history or as a reckoning with an ultra-left movement for social justice and equality around which the domestic story was built.... That way of talking about a book as which narrative came first is always already too late because the origins lie far earlier.... It was as if the book had already been there, waiting patiently to be let in; I only had to open the door."

• Harikrishnan, Charmy (6 October 2014). "The life of Neel". Profile. India Today. 39 (40): 70–71.

• Official website
• Profile at the British Council
• Neel Mukherjee at Penguin India