Vikram Seth is the son of a judge and a businessman. He was born in Calcutta [now Kolkata], in India and is among India’s most celebrated novelists and poets. 

During his A-levels, Vikram developed interest in Chinese language and poetry. This led to him studying creative writing at Stanford University and classical Chinese poetry at Nanjing University after his interest in the economic field dried out. Vikram’s first volume of poetry, Mappings, was published in 1980. His travelogue From Heaven Lake, the story of his hitchhiking journey from Nanking to New Delhi via Tibet, led to Vikram gaining more critical attention. 

The poetic craft of The Humble Administrator’s Garden helped foreshadow The Golden Gate’s polish, which was written entirely in metred and rhyming 14-line stanzas. It was based on Charles Johnston’s translation of Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Vikram used the controlled poetic form in his 1990 All You Who Sleep Tonight collection and wrote the 10 stories of Beastly Tales from Here and There in tetrametre couplets. 

In 1993, Vikram published the novel A Suitable Boy, set in a newly independent, post-partition India. The novel’s idea comes from the Indian tradition of arranging marriages for eligible young girls, with several points that comprise the ideal match. After winning his EMMA, Vikram became Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2001.