Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata); his family lived in a number of cities including the Bata Shoe Company town of Batanagar, near Calcutta, Patna and London, though never Calcutta proper during his childhood, he himself spending extended periods away at boarding school from the age of five. His father, Prem, was an executive of the Bata India Limited shoe company who migrated to post-Partition India from West Punjab in Pakistan; he had unsuccessfully courted a Sikh girl before meeting Seth's mother, Leila; she had had a chaste premarital dalliance with an unsuitable Christian boy and was the first woman judge on the Delhi High Court as well as the first woman to become Chief Justice of a state High Court, at Simla. She studied law in London while pregnant with Seth's younger brother and came first in her Bar examinations conducted only weeks after she delivered her second child. That child, Vikram Seth's younger brother, Shantum, leads Buddhist meditational tours; his younger sister, Aradhana, is a film-maker married to an Austrian diplomat, who worked on Deepa Mehta's Earth and Fire. (Compare the characters Haresh, Lata, Savita and two of the Chatterjee siblings in A Suitable Boy: Seth has been unusually candid in acknowledging that many of his fictional personnel are drawn from life; he has said that only the dog Cuddles in A Suitable Boy has his real name — "Because he can't sue"; Justice Leila Seth has said in her memoir On Balance that other characters in A Suitable Boy are composites but Haresh is a portrait of her husband Premo.) Having lived in London for many years he now maintains residences near Salisbury, England, where he is a notable participant in local literary and cultural events and in 2006 bought and renovated the house of the seventeenth century Anglican divine and metaphysical poet George Herbert and in Delhi, where he lives with his parents and keeps his extensive library and papers.
Prizes and awards
1983 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
1985 Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) The Humble Administrator's Garden
1993 Irish Times International Fiction Prize (shortlist) A Suitable Boy
1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) A Suitable Boy
1994 WH Smith Literary Award A Suitable Boy
2001 EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award) for Best Book/Novel An Equal Music
2005 Pravasi Bharatiya Samman
Published works
Poetry
Mappings (1980)
The Humble Administrator's Garden (1985)
All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990)
Beastly Tales (1991)
Three Chinese Poets (1992)
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