Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. He has taught previously at Stanford University, and was a Fellow at the Newhouse Center for Humanities at Wellesley College. He is the author of Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire (Honorable Mention, Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, 2014), a study of modern world literature in English, College (2018), a general nonfiction on liberal arts education in India, and the co-editor, with Aarthi Vadde, of a collection of essays, The Critic as Amateur (2019). Saikat has published three novels, most recently, The Scent of God, a finalist for the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award, 2020, and one of Times of India’s “20 Most Talked About Indian Books of 2019”; The Firebird (published as Play House in the US), one of Telegraph’s Best Books of 2015 and a finalist at the Bangalore Literature Festival Fiction Prize and the Mumbai Film Festival Word-to-Screen Market, and Silverfish, 2007.