Rohinton Mistry – Year of election 2009

Rohinton Mistry’s first short stories were published in Canada in 1983, eight years after he moved there from India, and he writes about his native Bombay with the distilled concentration of the exile. His first collection, Tales from Firozsha Baag, appeared in 1987, since when he has published three novels, including A Fine Balance, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Overall Winner, 1996), and the Royal Society of Literature's Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. When the book was an Oprah’s Book Club choice in 2001 it sold an extra 500,000 copies.

Amanda Craig, writing in the Literary Review, said of A Fine Balance: “This is a work of genius. I cannot begin to review it without saying so. It should be read by everyone who loves books, win every prize, make its author a millionaire.”