Amitava Kumar, Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair, is author of My Beloved Life, newly published by Penguin Random House. Tracing a fictional life through 20th-century India, My Beloved Life illustrates the ways in which our seemingly normal lives are in themselves matters of consequence for others. “Kumar, the author of three previous novels and numerous works of nonfiction, is an observer to his core,” writes The New York Times. “He successfully enumerates the many forces and influences that shape an individual life.” And fellow novelist Salman Rushdie observes, “This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling…. [Kumar’s] novel offers magnificent witness and is not ordinary but extraordinary.”

Meantime, Amitava’s moving essay on finding solace in the words of others was published online by Literary Hub.