Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “Vikram Seth” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Vikram Seth 

Vikram Seth was born in Kolkata in 1952 to Prem Seth, a shoe company executive, and Laila Seth, a judge. Vikram Seth is the oldest of three children in the Seth family. He was sent to Doon school, a prestigious boarding school for boys, at the age of six. As a young student, Vikram was very shy, “Incapable of looking people in the eye,” he says. But what he lacked in sociability, he more than made up by excelling at his studies. After passing his `0 level’ exams with distinction, Vikram. won a scholarship to Tonbridge School in Kent, U.K. From Kent he soon went to the prestigious Oxford University on another scholarship and earned degrees in philosophy, economics, and politics. Not content with all this, Seth went to study at the Stanford University in the U.S. for a Ph D. in Economics. He spent the next 11 years “not getting the degree”, as he says. Two of -those years (1980-1982) were spent in China, where Seth studied poetry and languages at the Nanjing University of-China. It was while in China that Vikram realized he was “more interested in poetry than economics.”

In 1986, while still at Stanford, Seth produced a novel entirely in rhythmic verse (sonnets) called The Golden Gate, a story about life in San Francisco. Vikram had been discouraged by ‘many of his friends who felt that the book would never sell, but he didn’t mind their comments, even included them into the text “Drivel-ling in rhyme’s all very well/The question is does spittle sell? The Golden Gate was widely appreciated when it was released and sold over a 100, 000 copies. Seth’s next novel A Suitable Boy was published in 1993 and shot him to instant world -fame, selling over a million copies. The novel is the story of an Indian mother’s search for a suitable match for her daughter, set against the backdrop of life in India in the 1950s. With 1,349 pages, the book is the largest single volume novel in English. In his introduction to the book Seth urges potential readers: “Buy me before good sense insists/ You’ll strain your purse and sprain your wrists.” Seth’s second novel An Equal Music, released in 1999, was a love story among members of a music quartet. It deals with the feelings of Michael, a violinist who never recovers from the loss- of his only true love, a pianist he knew as a student in Vienna.