Rana Dasgupta

Born in 1971, Rana Dasgupta is a British novelist and essayist based in New Delhi. Through his varied body of work he has consistently explored themes of globalization, migration and the twenty-first-century city.

Dasgupta was born in Canterbury, England and studied at Balliol College, Oxford and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In 2001, he moved to Delhi to write. His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled, appeared in 2005 and was shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. Solo (2009) won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 2014 he published Capital, a non-fiction account of the stupendous changes engulfing his adopted city as a result of globalization.

Dasgupta is a columnist for Al Jazeera and a visiting professor at Brown University.

Rana Dasgupta has been invited by the Residency Fellow Programme at the Academy of Fine Arts funded by the Saastamoinen Foundation. Residency is implemented in co-operation with HIAP.


In Helsinki he will be working on his current novel, set in Finland, which considers the possibility of a profound transformation of the global nation-state system.