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Vikram Chandra was born in New Delhi in 1961. He completed most of his secondary education at Mayo College, Ajmer and after a short stay at St. Xavier's College in Mumbai, moved to the United States as an undergraduate student. In 1984, he graduated from Pomona College, Claremont with a magna cum laude BA in English, with a concentration in creative writing. He also attended the Film School at Columbia University in New York for a while, before leaving it to work on his first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, which was written over several years at the writing programs at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston, where he worked with John Barth and Donald Barthelme. He obtained an MA at Johns Hopkins and an MFA at the University of Houston . While writing Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Vikram also taught literature and writing, besides working independently as a computer programmer and consultant. Red Earth and Pouring Rain was published in 1995 to outstanding critical acclaim, and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. It was followed by a collection of linked short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region) and was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize. It was also included in the list of `Notable Books of 1997` by the New York Times Book Review and in their respective lists of 'Best Books of the Year' by the Independent (London), the Guardian (London) and Outlook magazine ( New Delhi ). Vikarm Chandra also co-wrote the script for the Hindi feature film Mission Kashmir, released internationally in 2000. Vikram Chandra currently divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley, where he teaches creative writing at the University of California.