Amitava Kumar, Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair, is a Fellow of the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Professor Kumar will complete work on a new novel entitled My Beloved Life at the Cullman Center. The novel will be published in 2024 and is under contract with Knopf in the US, Hamish Hamilton in Canada, Picador in the UK, and Aleph in India.

He will also work on a longform nonfiction report on recent changes in India, changes in the political landscape, and in the country’s ecology. Recent work published from this project includes the essay “Many Words for Heat, Many Words for Hate” in Granta 162, and a piece from March also for Granta entitled “Particulate Matter.”