Jeet Thayil
- India
- Guest at the ilb: 2013, 2026
Jeet Thayil, born near the Muvatuppuzha River in Kerala, India, in 1959, is an award-winning poet, novelist, and librettist, as well as a musician and literary editor.
Thayil attended schools in Hong Kong, New York and Mumbai, completing his master’s in fine arts at Sarah Lawrence College in New York State. He then pursued a career as a journalist between Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hong Kong, and New York. In 2004, after two decades in the field, he quit journalism and began to write fiction.
Thayil began writing poems as an adolescent and has published seven volumes: »Gemini« (1992), »Apocalypso« (1997), English (2004), »These Errors Are Correct« (2008), which won India’s Sahitya Akademi Award for English, New and Collected Poems (2015), and I’ll Have it Here (2024), which won the Sarojini Naidu Award and the Kalinga Literary Award. His most recent book of poems is a collaboration with John Kinsella, The City Under the City (2025). His poetry and prose often weave autobiographic details with classical motifs. As such, in the narrative cycle »English« (2004), he deals with his direct experience of the 9/11 attacks. In These Errors are Correct (2008), he uses strict verse forms—rhymed syllabics, the canzone, terza rima, the sonnet, the sestina, the ghazal—to describe the formless stages of grief.
His debut novel Narcopolis (2012) refers back to his own experiences with drug and alcohol addiction, and was the first in a series of novels making up his »Bombay Trilogy« (alongside The Book of Chocolate Saints [2017] and Low [2020]). It won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The novel memorializes the city of Mumbai and the inhabitants of its opium dens throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties. He presented Narcopolis as a guest of the ilb in 2013. His writing (and this trilogy in particular) often explores addiction, sex, memory, faith, and marginality as integral parts of city life, rather than as taboos. Continuing this focus on the “other-ed” sides of popular narratives, his novel »Names of the Women« (2021) explores the stories of fifteen female characters of the Christian New Testament.
His latest book, »The Elsewhereans: A Documentary Novel« , was released in the summer of 2025 but is already being hailed as a masterpiece. The narrative crosses genres and borders to tell the story of his extended family and their complex relationship to geography, migration, and home.
In addition to his literary work, Thayil is also a musician; one half of the avant-garde music duo Sridhar/Thayil (alongside Suman Sridhar), one third of the electronica-spoken word trio HMT, a member of the proto-noise Berlin- and Delhi-based band Still Dirty, and a librettist for operas including »Babur in London« (2012).
He has also been engaged as an editor and anthologist, editing, among others, »The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets« (2008) and »The Penguin Book of Indian Poets« (2022). Thayil is the founder of the Shakti Bhatt Prize, named for and in memory of his late wife, which was awarded to debut authors in India from 2008 until 2025. In 2025, he created an imprint, Thayil Editions, in partnership with HarperCollins India, that seeks to identify and nurture experimental poetry and fiction written in English in India. The first volume in the series, Adil Jussawalla’s Soliloquies, appeared earlier this year. In these capacities as curator and cultivator of literature, he has shown a commitment to broadening the range of voices that receive mainstream recognition. Thayil lives in Bengaluru.
As of 2025
Gemini
Viking
New Delhi, 1992
Apocalypso
Aark Arts
London, 1997
English
Rattapallax Press, Penguin
New York, New Delhi 2004
These Errors Are Correct
Westland & Tranquebar Press
New Delhi, 2008
Narcopolis
Penguin
New York, 2012
Collected Poems
Aleph Book Company
New Delhi, 2015
The Book of Chocolate Saints
Aleph Book Company
New Delhi, 2017
Low
Faber & Faber
London, 2020
Names of the Women
Jonathan Cape (Penguin)
New York, 2021
The Elsewhereans: A Documentary Novel
HarperCollins
New Delhi, 2025