Rana Dasgupta is a British novelist and essayist. Born in Canterbury in 1971, he studied at Balliol College, Oxford and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In 2001, he moved to New Delhi to write Tokyo Canceled, a collection of contemporary folktales, published in 2005. His novel, Solo (2009), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 2014 he published Capital, a non-fiction account of the changes overtaking his adopted city as a result of globalization. Capital won the Ryszard Kapuściński Award and the Prix Émile Guimet.

Between 2014 and 2018, Dasgupta was Distinguished Visiting Lecturer and Writer-in-Residence at Brown University. In 2017, he created the JCB Price for Literature, India’s leading literary award, serving as Literary Director until 2020. Dasgupta’s essays and articles have appeared in such venues as Harper’s, Granta, New Statesman, Prospect, The Paris Review, The Guardian and The New York Times.

In 2018, Dasgupta published a manifesto (“The Demise of the Nation-State”, The Guardian, 5 April 2018) for a new account of human political organization. Written at Brown University and the University of Oxford, After Nations will appear in 2025.