Rana Dasgupta is an award-winning British novelist and essayist. He received his BA (Hons) in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford, followed by an MA in Communication Arts from the University of Madison-Wisconsin. He was a Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, from 2020 to 2022. Before that, he was Distinguished Visiting Lecturer and Writer-in-Residence at Brown University (2014–18) and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of the Arts in Helsinki (March 2016). Rana is also the Founder of the JCB Prize for Literature, a $35,000 prize offered annually to a distinguished work of fiction by an Indian writer. He served as the prize’s inaugural Literary Director from 2017 to 2019.

Rana has published four books, a podcast, and numerous essays and short stories. His first non-fiction book Capital: The Eruption of Delhi was published in 2014 and was awarded the Windham–Campbell Prize, the Rysard Kapuściński Award and the Prix Émile Guimet de Littérature Asiatique. His latest book, After Nations: The Making & Unmaking of a World Order, was published in 2026. It offers a global history of the nation-state and a diagnosis of the large-scale transition engulfing the world today.