Amit Chaudhuri (born 15 May 1962) is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer, and music composer from India.

His mother, Bijoya Chaudhuri, was a highly acclaimed singer of Rabindra Sangeet, Nazrulgeeti, Atul Prasad and Hindi bhajans.

[7] In 2013, Chaudhuri became the first person to be awarded the Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution to the humanities in Literary Studies, by a jury comprising Amartya Sen, Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia University), Homi Bhabha (Harvard), Sheldon Pollock (Columbia), former Indian chief justice Leila Seth, and legal thinker Upendra Baxi (Warwick).

In his prize-giving address, Amartya Sen said: "He [Chaudhuri] is of course a remarkable intellectual with a great record for literary writing showing a level of sensibility as well as a kind of quiet humanity which is quite rare.

Fiction A Strange and Sublime Address, Chaudhuri's first novel, published in 1991, was republished by Penguin Random House India in 2016 as a 25th anniversary edition, with a foreword by Colm Toibin.

Set against the background of the post-Babri Masjid demolition, it is a record of both the artificial quiet that such a socio-political situation creates as well as the evocation of a Calcutta winter where everyday life must go on.

A New World (2001), Chaudhuri's fourth novel, tells the story of Jayojit Chatterjee, who returns after a divorce with his seven-year-old son Vikram ("Bonny") to Calcutta to visit his aging parents.

It is an account of a narrator and novelist called Amit Chaudhuri who visits Bombay, a city where he grew up, for a book event.

Literary Activism, a collection of essays by a variety of participants at the first symposium of the same name (see below), was published in 2017 by Boiler House Press in the UK, and by OUP in India and the US.

Finding the Raga, an exploration of Hindustani classical music, was published by Faber in the UK, NYRB Books in the US and Penguin in India in 2021.

Sweet Shop, his second book of poems, appeared from Penguin Random House India in 2018, and from Salt (UK) in 2019.

James Wood, writing about Chaudhuri in The New Yorker, said: "He has beautifully practiced that 'refutation of the spectacular' throughout his career, both as a novelist and as a critic.

[10] A New World: "The condition of a stranger in a familiar land is dramatized with beguiling simplicity and tact in this deeply moving fourth novel.... A pitch-perfect analysis of repressed and stunted emotion, and another triumph to set beside those of Desai, Rushdie, Roy, and especially (the Chekhovian master Chaudhuri most closely resembles) R.K.

Kirkus Reviews[14] The Immortals: "Amit Chaudhuri, himself a composer and musician, excels in the passages devoted to music, "the miracle of song and its pleasure".

[16] Telling Tales: "Chaudhuri's intellectual project is not so much to cross academic boundaries as to remove the sign that says: "No playing on the grass".

"[19] Finding the Raga: Dr. Simon Cooke, Chair of the judges in the Biography category of the James Tait Black Prize, called Finding the Raga "a work of great depth, subtlety, and resonance, which unobtrusively changed the way we thought about music, place, and creativity.

Folding the ethos of the raga into its own form, it is a beautifully voiced, quietly subversive masterpiece in the art of listening to the world.

Writing about these houses made in the twentieth century, he lists their characteristics: These were the house's features: a porch on the ground floor; red oxidised stone floors; slatted Venetian or French-style windows painted green; round knockers on doors; horizontal wooden bars to lock doors; an open rooftop terrace; a long first-floor verandah with patterned cast-iron railings; intricately worked cornices; and ventilators the size of an open palm, carved as intricate perforations into walls.

(Some houses built in the 1940s also incorporate perky art-deco elements: semi-circular balconies; a long, vertical strip comprising glass panes for the stairwell; porthole-shaped windows; and the famous sunrise motif on grilles and gates.)

[25] He learned singing from his mother, Bijoya Chaudhuri, and from the late Pandit Govind Prasad Jaipurwale[26] of the Kunwar Shyam gharana.