Upadhyay, Samrat

Samrat Upadhyay (Nepali: सम्राट उपाध्याय) (born 1964) is a Nepalese born American writer who writes in English. Upadhyay is a professor of creative writing and has previously served as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University. He is the first Nepali-born fiction writer writing in English to be published in the West. He was born and raised in Kathmandu, Nepal, and came to the United States in 1984 at the age of twenty-one. He lives with his wife and daughter in Bloomington, Indiana. In 2001, Upadhyay won a Whiting Award for fiction. He was an English professor at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio before moving to Indiana in 2003. His books specially portray the current situation in Nepal, which Upadhyay views largely through the lens of contemporary American realist fiction. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Upadhyay is "like a Buddhist Chekhov."