Saikat Majumdar is a novelist, academic, and a commentator on the arts, literature, and higher education. He is the author of five novels, most recently, The Remains of the Body (2024), The Middle Finger (2022), The Scent of God (2019), and The Firebird (2015), published as Play House in the US in 2017), and Silverfish (2007). He has also published two books of literary criticism, The Amateur (2024), Prose of the World (2013), a general nonfiction book on higher education, College: Pathways of Possibility (2018), and a co-edited collection of essays, The Critic as Amateur (2019).
Saikat has taught world literature at Stanford University, was a Fellow at the Humanities Centre at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. In Spring 2023, he was a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study (STIAS), South Africa. He has been appointed a Fellow at Institute of Advanced Study at the Central European University in Spring 2025. He is also a Research Fellow in English at the University of the Free State in South Africa. Saikat has been elected a Member of the International Association of University Professors in English (IAUPE) in April 2025 and will address the association at its next Annual Conference in Munich in July 2026. He is currently Professor of English & Creative Writing at Ashoka University.
He writes regularly for the Telegraph, Times Higher Education, Outlook, Hindu, Hindustan Times, The Wire, The Indian Express, Scroll, and a book column for the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), “Another Look at India’s Books.”
Saikat is currently working on a monograph, The Critic as Artist, and a nonfiction book on higher education, Open Intelligence: Education between Art and Artificial, both under contract for publication.
Saikat Majumdar: Ashoka University
Instagram |Facebook| X (formerly Twitter)| LinkedIn
