Aravind Adiga

Adiga was born in Madras and raised largely in Mangalore before his family emigrated to Australia; he studied English at Columbia and Oxford and worked as a financial journalist for Time and other outlets, reporting on India's stock markets and its widening inequality from the inside.

The White Tiger (2008), his debut novel, is narrated by Balram Halwai, a driver from a poor village who claws his way to entrepreneurial success in Bangalore through blackmail and, eventually, his employer's murder, told as a series of letters to a visiting Chinese premier that mock India's celebrated growth story from underneath it. It won the Booker Prize in its first year of eligibility for debut novels under the prize's opened rules.

He has continued to write journalism-inflected fiction set in the same restless, unequal India, including Last Man in Tower and Amnesty, while dividing his time between Mumbai and abroad.