Among the later writers, the most notable is
Salman Rushdie, born in India and now living in the UK. Rushdie, with his famous work ''
Midnight's Children'' (
Booker Prize 1981, Booker of Bookers 1992, and Best of the Bookers 2008), ushered in a new trend of writing. He used a hybrid language – English generously peppered with Indian terms – to represent India. His works are categorised as
magic realism.
Nayantara Sehgal was one of the first female Indian writers in English to receive wide recognition. Her fiction deals with India's elite responding to the crisis engendered by political change. She was awarded the 1986
Sahitya Akademi Award for English, for her novel,
Rich Like Us (1985), by the
Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.
Anita Desai, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel
Fire on the Mountain and a British
Guardian Prize for
The Village by the Sea. Her daughter
Kiran Desai won the 2006
Man Booker Prize for her second novel,
The Inheritance of Loss.
Ruskin Bond received Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection of short stories
Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra in 1992. He is also the author of a historical novel
A Flight of Pigeons, which is based on an episode during the
Indian Rebellion of 1857.
Vikram Seth, author of
The Golden Gate (1986) and
A Suitable Boy (1994) is a writer who uses a purer English and more realistic themes. Vikram Seth is notable both as an accomplished novelist and a prolific poet. Another writer who has contributed immensely to the Indian English Literature is
Amitav Ghosh who is the author of
The Circle of Reason (his 1986
debut novel),
The Shadow Lines (1988),
The Calcutta Chromosome (1995),
The Glass Palace (2000),
The Hungry Tide (2004), and
Sea of Poppies (2008), the first volume of
The Ibis trilogy, set in the 1830s, just before the
Opium War, which encapsulates the colonial history of the East. Ghosh's latest work of fiction is
River of Smoke (2011), the second volume of
The Ibis trilogy.
Jhumpa Lahiri is a British-born
Indian American of
Bengali descent whose works portray the Indian-immigrant experiences in the
United States. She won the
Pulitzer prize for fiction for her debut collection
Interpreter of Maladies, which explores the lives of first-generation Indian immigrants. Her first novel,
The Namesake, which is made into
a film, depicts Bengali immigrant-couple struggles and adjustments to move to the United States from
Calcutta. Her second story collection,
Unaccustomed Earth, depicts the experiences of the
second and third generation Indian Americans. Her second novel,
The Lowland, which tells the story of two brothers, Subhash and Udayan Mitra, whose lives diverge sharply against the backdrop of 1960s India and the rise of the
Naxalite movement, was placed on the shortlist for the
2013 Man Booker Prize.
Rohinton Mistry is an Indian-born Canadian author who is a
Neustadt International Prize for Literature laureate (2012). His first book
Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), published by
Penguin Books Canada, is a collection of 11 short stories. His novels
Such a Long Journey (1991) and
A Fine Balance (1995) earned him great acclaim. In a similar vein,
M. G. Vassanji was born in
Kenya of Indian descent and emigrated to Canada; he twice won the
Giller Prize, for
The Book of Secrets (1994) and
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), as well as the
Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction for
A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008), a travelogue.
Shashi Tharoor, in his
The Great Indian Novel (1989), follows a story-telling (though in a satirical) mode as in the
Mahabharata drawing his ideas by going back and forth in time. His work as UN official living outside India has given him a vantage point that helps construct an objective Indianness.
Vikram Chandra is another author who shuffles between India and the United States and has received critical acclaim for his first novel
Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) and collection of short stories
Love and Longing in Bombay (1997). His namesake
Vikram A. Chandra is a renowned journalist and the author of
The Srinagar Conspiracy (2000).
Suketu Mehta is another writer currently based in the United States who authored
Maximum City (2004), an autobiographical account of his experiences in the city of Mumbai. In 2008,
Aravind Adiga received the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel
The White Tiger. Recent writers in India such as
Arundhati Roy and
David Davidar show a direction towards contextuality and rootedness in their works. Arundhati Roy, a trained architect and the 1997 Booker prize winner for her
The God of Small Things, calls herself a "home grown" writer. Her award-winning book is set in the immensely physical landscape of
Kerala. Davidar sets his
The House of Blue Mangoes in Southern
Tamil Nadu. In both books, geography and politics are integral to the narrative. In his novel
Lament of Mohini (2000),
Shreekumar Varma touches upon the matriarchal system and the
sammandham system of marriage as he writes about the Namboodiris and the aristocrats of Kerala.
Jahnavi Barua, a
Bangalore-based author from
Assam has set her critically acclaimed collection of short stories
Next Door on the social scenario in Assam with insurgency as the background. The stories and novels of
Ratan Lal Basu reflect the conditions of tribal people and
hill people of West Bengal and the adjacent states of Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal. Many of his short stories reflect the political turmoil of West Bengal since the Naxalite movement of the 1970s. Many of his stories like
Blue Are the Far Off Mountains,
The First Rain and
The Magic Marble glorify purity of love. His novel
Oraon and the Divine Tree is the story of a tribal and his love for an age old tree. ==Poetry==