Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969. He graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce from the Allahabad University before completing his MA in English Literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, in 1992, where he started contributing literary essays to various publications. His notable works include Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), a travelogue exploring social and cultural changes in India due to globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000) won the Los Angeles Times' Art Seidenbaum award. His book From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (2012) was acclaimed and won multiple awards, including the Crossword Award for Best Nonfiction in 2013. In 2014, it became the first book by a non-Western writer to win Germany's Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. In 2013, he published A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and its Neighbours and in 2017, Age of Anger: A History of the Present. He also published anthologies on India and introduced new editions of various classic works. Mishra's literary and political essays have appeared in major publications like the New York Times, the New Yorker, or The Guardian, among others. He has held visiting professorships and received prestigious awards, including the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize from Yale University in 2014.