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Kunal Basu is an Indian author and professor of economics at Oxford University. He is best known for his novels, The Japanese Wife, The Miniaturist, and The Opium Clerk. He has also written several non-fiction books, including The Rediscovery of India and The Last Jet Engine Laugh. Kunal Basu was born on 4 May 1956 in Kolkata, India. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and his Master of Arts degree from the Delhi School of Economics. He then went on to pursue a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Kunal Basu has been a professor of economics at Oxford University since 1997. He has also held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Kunal Basu has written several novels, including The Japanese Wife, The Miniaturist, and The Opium Clerk. He has also written several non-fiction books, including The Rediscovery of India and The Last Jet Engine Laugh. Kunal Basu has won several awards for his writing, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book for The Japanese Wife, the Crossword Book Award for Fiction for The Miniaturist, and the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Opium Clerk. As of 2021, Kunal Basu's net worth is estimated to be roughly $2 million.

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Occupation University Reader in Marketing at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Age 67 years old
Zodiac Sign Taurus
Born 4 May, 1956
Birthday 4 May
Birthplace Calcutta, West Bengal, India
Nationality India

We recommend you to check the complete list of Famous People born on 4 May. He is a member of famous with the age 67 years old group.

Kunal Basu Height, Weight & Measurements

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Who Is Kunal Basu's Wife?

His wife is Susmita Basu

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Kunal Basu Net Worth

His net worth has been growing significantly in 2022-2023. So, how much is Kunal Basu worth at the age of 67 years old? Kunal Basu’s income source is mostly from being a successful . He is from India. We have estimated Kunal Basu's net worth , money, salary, income, and assets.

Net Worth in 2023 $1 Million - $5 Million
Salary in 2023 Under Review
Net Worth in 2022 Pending
Salary in 2022 Under Review
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Timeline

2020

January 2020 saw Chitrakar - the Hindi translation of his second novel, The Miniaturist - being published by Vani Prakashan. The translation has been done by Prabhat Milind.

https://scroll.in/article/950072/an-adopted-daughter-comes-back-to-india-looking-for-her-biological-mother-in-this-novel - an excerpt from Sarojini's Mother, 21 Jan 2020

2019

Set in New York, Iraq and Bengal, this novel is a story of two sisters who accidentally find each other in the backdrop of an ongoing war, bringing to the fore a murky story of human trafficking in the Gulf. This book has been translated into English as The Endgame by Arunava Sinha (Picador Books India, 2019).

https://epaper.sangbadpratidin.in/epaper/m/354122/5cdcbeada4d4b - an Interview, 16 May 2019

2017

This novel was published by Sananda (a leading Bangla women's magazine) in their 2017 ‘Pujo-sankha’ – their coveted annual Durga puja edition.

2016

The cover design of Kalkatta (by Pinaki De) won two awards - the best Cover Design of India award from Oxford Bookstore at the Jaipur Literary Festival in 2016, and the best Cover Design of India award in Publishing Next 2017.

2014

Jami is the Gigolo King of Kalkatta. Smuggled into India from Bangladesh and given refuge by his uncle, a leader of the ruling Communist Party, he grows up in Zakaria Street—a Little Baghdad of the old—dreaming of becoming a pukka Kalkatta-wallah. When friendship with a local gang disqualifies him from school, he ends up as assistant to a passport forger, and then a masseur. Soon enough, innocent massage leads to 'plus plus treatments', and Kalkatta opens its doors, drawing Jami into the world of the rich and famous, housewives, tourists and travelling executives, and occasionally to high-paying and dangerous 'parties '. Danger looms, too, from rivals and the police, and the ever-present risk of losing his cover. Jami's shadowy double life takes a turn for the unexpected when he meets Pablo, a young boy who suffers from leukemia, and his single mother Mandira. Made to oscillate between his refugee family, the neighbourhood gang, his massage-parlour clients, even the cultured world of Bengali intellectuals inhabited by Mandira, he succeeds in becoming a true Kalkattawallah, but a stranger to himself. Until his love for Pablo threatens to destroy everything, and even drive away from his beloved city.

From a literary history point of view, this translation is very interesting and has a special literary significance—because it is not the English translation of a book by a vernacular writer, but the work of an established English novelist in his own bhasha having a fresh life in English.

2013

Kunal Basu (Bengali: কুনাল বসু) is an Indian author of English fiction who has written five novels – The Opium Clerk (2001), The Miniaturist (2003), Racists (2006), The Yellow Emperor's Cure (2011) Kalkatta (2015) and Sarojini’s Mother (2020). The title story of his only collection of short stories, The Japanese Wife (2008), was made into a film by the Indian filmmaker Aparna Sen. Basu has also written three Bengali novels – Rabi-Shankar (2016), Bairer Dorja (2017), and Tejoswini O Shabnam (2018).

Set in the Mughal court of Akbar the Great in the 16th century, this novel tells the story of Bihzad, son of the chief court painter. A child prodigy, Bihzad is groomed to take his father's place in the imperial court but the precocious and brilliant artist soon tires of imperial commissions and develops a grand and forbidden obsession. He leads a dual life – spending his nights painting the Emperor as his lover, and his days recording the Emperor's official biography in miniatures. But rumours about the wild, passionate nature of his secret drawings bring his enemies out into the open, who use his art to destroy him.

Basu has written three Bengali novels – Rabi-Shankar (2016), Bairer Dorja (2017) & Tejoswini O Shabnam (2018).

http://thepunchmagazine.com/the-byword/interviews/kolkata-grabbed-me-in-my-innards-kunal-basu – an Interview, June 2016

2004

Romancing the Strange: The Fiction of Kunal Basu. Ed. Subir Dhar et al. Calcutta: SSEI/TGI, 2004.

2000

http://iias.nl/books/writing-india-anew-indian-english-fiction-2000-2010 - “Of Art & the Artist: Kunal Basu’s The Miniaturist as a Mughal/Modern Novel”, by Rituparna Roy. In Writing India Anew: Indian English Fiction 2000-2010. Eds. Krishna Sen & Rituparna Roy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (AUP/ICAS Series), 2013. pp. 111–126.

1986

Following his doctoral degree, he was a professor at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, from 1986–1999. His 13 years at McGill were interrupted only by a brief stint at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, in 1989. Since 1999, he has been teaching at Oxford University's Saïd Business School. He has also written financial pieces for business publications such as Fast Company and MIT Sloan Management Review.

1982

In between he worked for an advertising agency, in freelance journalism, dabbled in filmmaking, and taught at Jadavpur University for a brief period of 16 months. In 1982, he met and married Susmita. Their daughter, Aparajita, was born soon after.

1970

This novel flits between contemporary and 1970's Calcutta. It is about two individuals who meet accidentally after 30 years. They had been mortal enemies during the Naxal period - one was a police officer and the other, a Naxalite. Each could have killed the other, and came very close to doing so. But 30 years later, the tide has turned, it is a different kind of world. The two individuals are in different stations in life: the ex-Naxal is now part of the affluent upper-middle class; and the police officer is a retired person, living a pretty ordinary life. They are awkward when they meet... and they do things to each other which they hadn't quite planned...

1898

Lisbon, 1898: philandering surgeon Antonio Maria discovers his beloved father is dying of syphilis, scourge of both rich and poor. Determined to find a cure, Antonio sets sail for Peking in the hope that traditional Chinese medicine has the answer that eludes the West. But when Antonio encounters the alluringly independent Fumi, he finds the first love he cannot leave behind.

1864

Kunal Basu is the only bilingual English-Bengali novelist after Bankimchandra Chatterjee (who had given up writing in English after his first and only English novel, Rajmohan's Wife, 1864).

1857

Hiran, the eponymous clerk of the title, is born in 1857: the year of Mutiny and the year his father dies. Brought to Calcutta by his widowed mother he turns out to have few talents, apart from an uncanny ability to read a man's lies in his palm. When luck gets him a job at the auction house, Hiran finds himself embroiled in a mysterious trade, and even more deeply embroiled in the affairs of his nefarious superior, the infamous Mr. Jonathan Crabbe and his opium addicted wife. An unlikely hero, Hiran is caught up in rebellion and war, buffeted by storms at sea, by love and intrigue, innocently implicated in fraud and dark dealings.

1855

1855: on a deserted island off the coast of Africa, the most audacious experiment ever envisaged is about to begin. To settle an argument that has raged inconclusively for decades, two scientists decide to raise a pair of infants, one black, one white, on a barren island, exposed to the dangers all around them, tended only by a young nurse whose muteness renders her incapable of influencing them in any way, for good or for bad. They will grow up without speech, without civilisation, without punishment or play. In this primitive environment, the children will develop as their primitive natures dictate.

1838

Basu is one of the very few Indian practitioners of historical fiction. Apart from his love of history, it has something to do with the influence of his favourite author, the Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94). Bankim (himself heavily influenced by Walter Scott) was a writer of historical novels, as were many other Bengali writers of the 19th and 20th centuries whom Basu avidly read as a child, like Ramesh Chandra Dutta and Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay. But more than anything, he has said what draws him most to this genre is the "romantic possibilities of the historical novel", the scope to inhabit other places and times and thus enable the reader to romance the strange.