Upadhyay

Upadhyay was born and reared in Kathmandu, Nepal, and lived there until he turned 21. According to his publishers, he is the first Nepalese-born fiction writer to be published in the West.

Among the five Kiriyama fiction finalists were winners and finalists of England’s Booker Prize and the National Book Award. Novelist Shan Sa, the 32-year-old author of The Girl Who Played Go (Chatto and Windus, U.K.; Alfred A. Knopf, U.S.) was announced the winner March 23.

But The Guru of Love, recently released in paperback, has had its lion’s share of critical attention, having been named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2003 and receiving rave reviews in both Publishers Weekly and the Library Journal. His first book, the short story collection, Arresting God in Kathmandu, was the recipient of the 2001 Whiting Writers’ Award.

Guru chronicles a doomed love affair between Ramchandra, an unhappy, overworked and married math teacher, and one of his mysterious young students, Malati. Set against a tumultuous political backdrop in 1990s Kathmandu, the story is about reconciling the spiritual and the sensual, accommodating tradition and dealing with the complexities of modernization. The work also reflects Upadhyay’s growing interest in the political fabric of Nepal. It touches upon the pro-democratic movement that occurred in the country during the early ’90s, a movement that is now being threatened by a violent Maoist insurgency.

Upadhyay addressed the rebellion, which has left thousands dead and has crippled an economy heavily dependent on tourism, in a November op-ed in the New York Times. In the editorial, he was critical of both the Maoists—for continuing the killing—and the monarchy, for raising public anxiety that the country was reverting to the repressive regime that ran the country from 1962 to 1990. He also urged the U.S. to treat the country like a “potential Afghanistan” and push for democratic change.