Manil suri biography sampler
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Suri began writing short stories in the 1980s during his spare time, but none were published. Suri received a six-figure advance as a result of a bidding war between publishing houses, ultimately won by W.W. Norton. In 2002, Suri won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for The Death of Vishnu. He is the author of three internationally acclaimed novels, The Death of Vishnu,The Age of Shiva, and The City of Devi.
His fiction has been translated into twenty-seven languages, longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award, LA Times Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and has won the McKittrick Prize and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, among others. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. In 1995 he began writing The Death of Vishnu, a novel about social and religious tensions in India taking place in an apartment building in contemporary Mumbai.
W. Norton, 2001)
An excerpt, "The Seven Circles", appeared in The New Yorker and the novel was published in 2001, becoming an international bestseller. The second book in the trilogy, The Age of Shiva, was published in 2008, with The Birth of Brahma slated as the third. in mathematics in 1983, and became a mathematics professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
His third novel, The City of Devi (2013), was ranked number 12 in the 50 essential works of LGBT fiction list by Flavorwire.
Suri was planning to write a trilogy of novels with titles featuring the three Hindu gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. He is a former contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, for which he has written several widely read pieces on India, mathematics, and LGBTQ+ issues.
He attended the University of Bombay before moving to the United States, where he attended Carnegie Mellon University. However, a reviewer in the Wall Street Journal praised the sex writing in the book, as did a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement, who also commented that Suri "admirably" handles the strands of "sex, mythology and global politics".
Suri has written an essay about growing up gay in India in the journal Granta and has published op-eds about gay issues in the New York Times and the Washington Post.
His second novel, The Age of Shiva (2008), was listed as one of the best books of the decade by About.com. He is the author of The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math, as well as three internationally acclaimed novels, The Death of Vishnu, The Age of Shiva, and The City of Devi.
Manil Suri
Manil Suri was born in Mumbai in 1959 and is a distinguished university professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
W. Norton, 2008)
This third novel ended up being based on Devi (the Mother Goddess) instead, with the title The City of Devi.
In December 2013, Suri won the "Bad Sex in Fiction" prize for the climactic sex scene in The City of Devi. He is also the author of The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math, which was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/E.O.
He was born in Mumbai in 1959 and is a distinguished university professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He lives with his husband in Silver Spring, Maryland.
At MacDowell, Manil worked on his third novel, The City of Devi.
About Manil Suri
Manil Suri is the author, most recently, of the memoir, A Room in Bombay (pub date Apr 21, 2026).