Siddhartha Deb is the author of the novels, The Point of Return (HarperCollins, 2003), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and An Outline of the Republic (HarperCollins, 2005). He is the recipient of grants from the Society of Authors in the UK and the Nation Institute in the USA and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University. His latest book, a work of narrative non-fiction, The Beautiful and the Damned (Penguin Viking, 2011), was a finalist for the Orwell Prize in the UK and the winner of the PEN Open award in the United States.