Kunzru, Hari

The British novelist Hari Kunzru was born in London to a Kashmiri Pandit father and an English mother. He read literature at Oxford and then an MA at the University of Warwick. He has worked as a DJ and as a freelance journalist for, for example, The Guardian and the Times of India and he has been music editor at Wallpaper. He has lived in London and New York. In 2003, Granta included him in their list of Best of Young British Novelists. He has been nominated for a large number of literary awards and he has won several. However, in 2003, he rejected a literary prize sponsored by the London tabloid Daily Mail because of the newspaper's constant "hostility towards black and Asian British people". He was also noted for his public reading of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in India, where it is banned.