Ferdinand mount pankaj mishra biography

For a long time, Pankaj Mishra was known as the young maven who ‘discovered’ Arundhati Roy.

Mishra was in his mid-twenties, fresh off the success of his first book (Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, a travelogue), when he began a six-month stint as the India head of HarperCollins. Among the manuscripts he read was a melancholy tale of a backwater village in Kerala.

Mishra thought its author—a screenwriter in her mid-thirties who had been moonlighting as an aerobics instructor—“had little notion of what the market required”.

Impressed, he called up Roy to congratulate her on writing “the greatest novel since Midnight’s Children”. The manuscript soon flew to London, and returned with the legendary agent David Godwin attached to it.

Mishra and Godwin secured Roy an advance of Rs1.25 lakh—the largest for a work of fiction in India at that time—for what would be The God of Small Things.