Tabish Khair Biography and latest books by Tabish Khair

Tabish Khair was born in Ranchi (1966), and grew up in Gaya. He has authored many books, including a collection of poetry, Where Parallel Lines Meet, the study, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English Novels and the novel, The Bus Stopped.


He has been awarded the All India Poetry Prize and honorary fellowship for creative writing. Other Routes, an anthology of pre-modern travel texts by Africans and Asians, co-edited and introduced by Khair. His work has appeared in various anthologies of poetry and fiction, including The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry, City Improbable: Writings on Delhi, The New Anthem, Fear Factor: Terror Incognito, Delhi Noir and Penguin\'s 60 Indian Poets. Khair works on academic papers, book reviews, essays, fiction and poems and these have appeared in Indian, British, American, German, Italian, South African, Chinese publications.

Khair lives in Aarhus, Denmark.

His growing up years…

Khair finished secondary school from the local Nazareth Academy and, after discontinuing medical studies, he did a BA in History, Sociology and English from Gaya College and a Masters in English from Magadh University. While a college student, he also worked as a reporter for the Patna Edition of the Times of India. Later, he left for Delhi, where he worked as a Staff Reporter for the Times of India. After about four years as a staff reporter, Khair left for Copenhagen, Denmark, to do a PhD, which he completed in 2000.

In an interview he says: I was born into a Muslim family in Bihar: Muslims are the biggest religious minority of India. But within the community of Indian Muslims, my family again belonged to a large minority: that of middle class, professional Muslims. My father was a doctor. My mother had a college degree in political science. Her father had been a police officer. 

 When you are born into a minority that is a minority within a minority, you learn to belong in different ways. I grew up as Indian and as Muslim. I grew up speaking three languages and writing two scripts. I was told or I read stories and poems from the West (especially Russian and British) as well as the East (especially Hindi/Urdu and from the Sanskrit and Persian-Arabic traditions). I was brought up on a concept of civilisation and modernity. While they had imbibed Western education, they often also had a sense of other sources of rational thinking and possible modernities.