Rohinton Mistry

Indian-Canadian · born 1952

Rohinton Mistry was born on July 3, 1952, in Bombay, into a Parsi family in a city he would spend the rest of his career writing from memory. He studied mathematics and economics at St. Xavier's College before emigrating to Canada in 1975 with his fiancee Freny Elavia, whom he married shortly after arriving in Toronto. For a decade he worked as a bank clerk while taking English and philosophy classes part time at the University of Toronto, where he won the Hart House literary prize twice for early short stories, a rare feat that convinced him to write full time. His debut collection, Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), set the pattern for everything that followed: closely observed Parsi lives in Bombay apartment blocks, rendered with a realist's patience and a comic's ear. His first novel, Such a Long Journey (1991), won the Governor General's Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, launching a run in which each of his three novels reached the Booker shortlist. A Fine Balance (1995) won the Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and became one of only two Canadian novels ever chosen for Oprah's Book Club. Family Matters (2002) won the Kiriyama Prize. Mistry has lived in the Toronto area for five decades, but every one of his novels returns to the Bombay he left as a young man, a city he renders with such exactness that readers often assume he never stopped living there. He was named to the Order of Canada in 2016 and won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2012, an award sometimes called the American Nobel. He continues to write and lives outside Toronto.