Aravind Adiga was born into a comparatively prosperous Indian family in Chennai (formerly Madras), India in 1974. Despite his privileged origins, his awareness of – and refusal to ignore – the brutalising and endemic poverty in the country he loves (and wishes to reform) became the focus for his Man Booker Award-winning debut novel, The White Tiger in 2008.

The novel vividly illustrates the contrast between objective measures of a ‘healthy economy’ and the harsh, bare privations this generic term often means for vast numbers of people. Through letters written late at night to the Premier of the People’s Republic of China on the eve of his visit to India, the novel’s main character Balram Halwai (the ‘white tiger’ of the novel’s title), describes his rise from a childhood of abject poverty to an adulthood of scheming and criminally acquired wealth. Adiga is not really condemning prosperity – he is attacking the co-existence of surreal wealth with grotesque poverty, which he feels sponsors ruthless and unprincipled individual acquisitiveness at least as much as the noble altruism and solidarity it is often sentimentally supposed to produce.

Aravind Adiga is a calm but passionately engaged voice for justice, a man who fervently believes that superb writing (like that of Flaubert, Balzac, Dickens, and, we must now add, that of Adiga) can help reform societies for the better. Aravind Adiga currently writes on a freelance basis and lives in Mumbai, India.