KIRAN NAGARKAR is one of India’s most highly regarded writers. His critically acclaimed novel Cuckold was given the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2001. While Gore Vidal said ‘(Cuckold) is a fascinating book, a sort of fantastic marriage between the Thomas Mann of Royal Highness and the Lady Murasaki’, Khushwant Singh considered ‘Cuckold … as the best by an Indian’. Nagarkar’s other novels include God’s Little Soldier and the Ravan and Eddie trilogy (Ravan and Eddie, The Extras, Rest in Peace). One of the sharpest critics of India’s socio-political scenario, he is also the author of the play Bedtime Story, which had been banned for years, and the screenplay Black Tulip, published as a single volume in February 2015. Nagarkar received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2012. The Tata Literature Live! and the Chandigarh Literature Festival gave him the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015 and 2016 respectively. His novels have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese as well as Marathi. Nagarkar also writes in Marathi and has penned plays and, in fact, began his career in the language in 1974 with his first novel Saat Sakkam Trechalis, a landmark in Indian literature, which was translated into English as Seven Sixes Are Forty-Three. It has recently been republished as a Harper Perennial.