Samanth Subramanian is an Indian writer and journalist based in London.[1][2] He studied journalism at Penn State University and international relations at Columbia University. In 2018–19, he was a Leon Levy Fellow at the City University of New York. He is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian and WIRED.
Subramanian's first book Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (2010, Penguin Books India) was a travelogue about Indian fisheries and seafood cuisine.
His second book This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan Civil War (2015, Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-0857895950) was nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize.[3] He became only the second Indian writer after Suketu Mehta to be nominated for this prestigious award for literary non-fiction.[1][4] William Dalrymple, writing in The Guardian, considered it a remarkable and moving portrayal of the agonies of the conflict that "will stand as a fine literary monument against the government’s attempt at imposed forgetfulness".[2]
His third major work, A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane (2019) is a biography of J. B. S. Haldane.[5] The book has been selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2020 by The New York Times.[6]
His articles cover a wide variety of subjects ranging from land reclamation in Singapore[7] to Tamil pulp fiction.[8]
