Vikram Seth is an Anglo-Indian writer perhaps best known for his monumental, nearly 1,500-page novel on domestic and political life in mid-twentieth-century India, A Suitable Boy (1993). But it was as the author of The Golden Gate (1986), his novel in verse, written while he was still at Stanford, that Seth first made a name for himself. The publication of The Golden Gate in the United States also brought the broader literary public the unexpected news that younger poets were not only once again writing in formal rhyme and meter but also were doing so with ease, vitality, and narrative dexterity.

Vikram Seth (pronounced "sate") was born on 20 June 1952 in Calcutta, India, the first of three children of Premnath Seth, a business consultant, and Laila Seth, a lawyer who became the first woman chief justice in India. Seth was educated at the exclusive Doon School, the preparatory school for India's...