[1] His debut novel The Last Song of Dusk (2004)[2] won the Betty Trask Award (UK),[3] the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy,[4] and was nominated for the IMPAC Prize in Ireland.

[7] His acclaimed first work of non-fiction, Loss (HarperCollins | 2020), is a collection of essays that chart an intimate landscape of death, grief, and healing.

Born in Juhu, Mumbai, to a Gujarati Sanghvi family,[8] Siddharth's father is businessman, while his grandfather, Arvind Vasavada, was a psychoanalyst and Jungian scholar.

He then moved to Northern California, having an aunt and uncle in Berkeley, and enrolled in a master's degree in mass communications at San Jose State University.

[9][10][11] Shanghvi has been compared to Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth in his writing styles, especially for using settings of magical realism, and themes such as karma, love, and sexuality extensively in The Last Song of Dusk.