Head of the Department, Creative Writing,
Professor of English and Creative Writing, Ashoka University
Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. He was educated in India and in the United States, where he taught for several years, most recently at Stanford University. He is also a renowned novelist and critic.
His most recent novel The Scent of God (2019) was one of Times of India’s 20 Most Talked About Indian Books of 2019, and a Finalist for the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award 2020. His book on global modernisms, Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire (Columbia University Press & Orient Blackswan, 2013 & 2015) was a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association Annual Book Prize in 2014. His novel, titled The Firebird, published in the US as Play House, is one of Telegraph’s Best Books of 2015 and a finalist for the Atta-Galatta/Bangalore Literature Festival Fiction Prize in 2015 and the Mumbai Film Festival Word-to-Screen Market in 2016.
Professor Majumdar has written popular media articles in The Hindu, Times Higher Education, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, Caravan, Scroll, Telegraph, Times of India. He is also a columnist for Outlook and Los Angeles Review of Books.
His scholarship has appeared in major journals and collections, including PMLA, NLH: New Literary History, Cambridge History of the Indian Novel in English, Cambridge Companion to the Essay, Cambridge History of the British Essay, Modern Fiction Studies, and Literary Activism: A Collection of Perspectives, Ed. Amit Chaudhuri.
Professor Majumdar’s research interests include Modern and Contemporary World Literature in English, Modernism, Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, the Novel and Narrative Theory, Critical University Studies, the History of Criticism, Fiction and Non-Fiction Writing.
Books Written
Works Edited
Literature and the World
Forms of Literature
Postcolonial Literature
Literary Modernism
Introduction to Creative Writing
The Craft of Writing
Fiction Workshop
Fellowship, Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities, Wellesley College
Fellowship, Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Studies, JNU
Recipient of grants and fellowships from The University of Chicago, and the Humanities Center at Stanford University