Ved Mehta – Year of election 2009

Ved Mehta was born in India, educated in America and Britain and was a staff writer on The New Yorker for over thirty years. Acclaimed as a reporter and autobiographer, he has published twenty six books, including studies of philosophers, theologians and the history and politics of India. Having lost his sight at the age of four, he has also written about blindness, which he has however  never allowed to determine his life or his career. His major work has been Continents of Exile, a twelve volume family saga he calls ‘a cross cultural story of India, England and America’, beginning with his forebears in nineteenth century India and tracing their and his own story up to the present day. R.K.Narayan described  it as a literary masterpiece. Ved Mehta has  received two Guggenheim Fellowships and the MacArthur Prize Fellowship and held the Rosenkranz Chair in Writing at Yale University; he is an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He lives in New York with his wife and two daughters.