Rohinton Mistry

Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay, India. He graduated with a degree in Mathematics from Bombay University before immigrating to Canada in 1975, and subsequently becoming a Canadian citizen. In Toronto, he worked at a bank while completing his second degree in English and Philosophy at the University of Toronto.

Although he has not lived in his native India for many years, like many expatriate writers, he continues a relationship with his country of origin through his writings. He has enriched his readers' understanding of India, its society, cultures and politics, reflecting extensively on issues of human rights and responsible citizenship.

Mr. Mistry is one of today's most prominent writers in the English language. His three novels have all been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and his work has been translated into over 25 languages.

Four years after publishing a collection of stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag in 1987, he published his first novel, Such a Long Journey, which follows a bank clerk's unwitting descent into corrupt political dealings in Bombay. The novel won the Governor General's Award in 1991, the Commonwealth Writers Prize - Overall Best Book, and the SmithBooks First Novel Award. Next came A Fine Balance, which won the 1995 Giller Prize, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Writer's Prize - Overall Best Book, and the Royal Society of Literature's Winnifred Holtby Award. His novel, Family Matters, published in 2002, won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize for Fiction and the Canadian Authors Association Fiction Award.

Rohinton Mistry was awarded a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellowship in 2004 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. In 2015, he was appointed Member of the Order of Canada, “for his acclaimed work as an author of international renown.”