Rohinton Mistry Biography

Indian novelist and short-story writer, born in Bombay; he was educated at the University of Bombay and, following his emigration to Canada in 1975, at the University of Toronto. Mistry's reputation was established with the interlinked short-stories of Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), which deal with the Parsi inhabitants of a Bombay block of flats. The stories' thematic concern with personal and communal identity is extended in the treatment of the Parsi community in his prize-winning novel Such a Long Journey (1991); the novel sets up a compelling interaction between the fortunes of its hapless chief protagonist and the workings of history, as events draw him into political and financial intrigues surrounding the creation of Bangladesh. Similar themes are explored in his second novel, A Fine Balance (1996).