UEA Professor of Contemporary Literature Amit Chaudhuri has won the 2012 Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution to the Humanities in Literary Studies. The jury for the £30,000 pound award includes Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, Harvard professor Homi Bhabha, Columbia professors Akeel Bilgrami and Sheldon Pollock, and Leila Seth, India’s first female high court chief justice. The Infosys Prizes were instituted in 2008, and this is the first to given in Literary Studies. Amit (pictured) teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at UEA, and will be launching an international UEA writing programme in India next spring with an eight-day course for twenty-four students. He is the author of numerous works, including five novels, most resently ‘The Immortals’ (2010), a book of short stories, a book of poems, a critical study of DH Lawrence’s poetry, and the collection of essays ‘Clearing Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture’ (2008). Among the awards he has won for his fiction are the Commonwealth Writers Prize, a Betty Trask award, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi award.
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