Author Profiles

AMIT MAJMUDAR is a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. He is the author of seventeen books so far in a variety of categories, with different bodies of work published in the United States and in India.

POETRY: His poetry collections include 0’, 0’ (Northwestern, 2009), shortlisted for the Norma Faber First Book Award; and Heaven and Earth (2011, Storyline Press), which won the Donald Justice Prize. These volumes were followed by Dothead (Knopf, 2016) and What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020). His poems have won the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in the Norton Introduction to Literature, The New Yorker, and numerous Best American Poetry anthologies as well as journals and magazines across the United States, UK, India, and Australia. Majmudar also edited, at Knopf’s invitation, a political poetry anthology entitled Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now. Majmudar’s forthcoming volume, a hybrid of prose, drama, and poetry, is Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2024).

NONFICTION: Majmudar’s essays have appeared in Marginalia at the Los Angeles Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor, as well as The Best American Essays 2018, The New York Times, and the Times of India, among several other publications. His collection of essays, focusing on Indian religious philosophy, history, and mythology, is Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books, 2023). Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023) is a memoir, in prose and verse, about his son’s struggle with congenital heart disease.

FICTION: Majmudar’s work as a novelist includes two works of historical fiction centered around the 1947 Partition of India, Partitions (Holt/Metropolitan, 2011) and The Map and the Scissors (HarperCollins India, 2022). His first children’s book also focuses on Indian history and is entitled Heroes the Colour of Dust (Puffin India, 2022). Majmudar has also penned a tragicomic, magical realist fable of Indian soldiers during World War I, Soar (Penguin India, 2020). The Abundance (Holt/Metropolitan, 2013), by contrast, is a work of contemporary realism exploring Indian-American life. Majmudar’s long-form fiction has garnered rave reviews from NPR’s All Things Considered, The Wall Street Journal, Good Housekeeping, and The Economist, as well as starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist; his short fiction won a 2017 O. Henry Prize.

MYTHOLOGY: Majmudar’s work in Hindu mythology includes a polyphonic Ramayana retelling, Sitayana (Penguin India, 2019), and The Book of Vows (Penguin India, 2023), the first volume in a trilogy that retells the ancient epic poem, Mahabharata. The forthcoming volumes are entitled The Book of Discoveries and The Book of Killings. He has also composed a forthcoming original mythological story cycle called The Later Adventures of Hanuman (Penguin India, 2024).

TRANSLATION: His work as a translator includes Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary (Knopf, 2018), available both in the United States and India.