2024 Winner

Pankaj Mishra is an essayist, memoirist, and public intellectual whose writing expands the world’s understanding of the Global South, Western imperialism in Asia, and contemporary spirituality. Born in northwest India, his most popular work of nonfiction is the best-selling Age of Anger: A History of the Present. Mishra began his literary career in 1992 in the Himalayan village of Mashobra, where he contributed essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer.  

His first book was Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India, which described the social and cultural changes in India caused by globalization. His nonfiction works expertly mix memoir, travelogue, history, and philosophy, as exemplified in An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World; Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond; and A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and Its Neighbours. Mishra is also the author of two novels published twenty-two years apart: The Romantics, which was translated into 11 languages and won the Los Angeles Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction, and his most recent book Run and Hide. 

In 2014 Mishra became the first non-Western writer to win Germany’s prestigious Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding for From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. It was also shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in the United Kingdom, the Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award in the United States, and the Lionel Gelber Prize in Canada. 

In 2005 he published the anthology India in Mind, bringing together some of the best fiction, nonfiction, and poetry about the world’s second most populous nation. His writing has been anthologized in The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Occupy Handbook, among other titles. His most recent book of nonfiction is Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire, a collection of essays that address colonialism, human rights, and weakening Anglo-American hegemony. 

Mishra writes literary and political essays for The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and London Review of Books, among other American, British, and Indian publications. His work has also appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Wall Street Journal, and Granta. He was a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and The New York Times Book Review. 

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Mishra was named one of Foreign Policy’s top 100 global thinkers and was nominated for Prospect magazine’s list of 50 World Thinkers. When he received Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the jury called his prose “distinguished by a mellifluous yet precise phrasing whose generous intelligence speaks to the general reader and specialist alike.” 

Mishra is the second annual winner of the Weston International Award. He lives in London and Mashobra, India.