David Davidar
David Davidar was born in 1958 in a small town on the southern tip of India. After studying at Madras University he embarked on a career in magazine journalism, taking a break to study publishing at Harvard. It was there that he met the then chairman of Penguin, Peter Mayer who was contemplating establishing an office in India. Mayer asked Davidar if he was interested in returning to India to help set up the new company and Davidar agreed, becoming at aged twenty-six, one of the youngest publishers in the world. During his time at Penguin India he has published some of the biggest authors in the business including; Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, RK Narayan, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Kiran Desai, Shashi Tharoor and Mark Tully.
In May 2000, Davidar was appointed Managing Director of Dorling Kindersley India, the Indian subsidiary of the world’s leading illustrated reference publisher. He has also written for such magazines as The Hindu, Gentleman, GFQ, TV & Video World, Technocrat & Business Computer. He is married and lives in New Delhi.
Davidar is the author of the novel The House of Blue Mangoes, published in 2002 and translated into 16 languages. It was a New York Times Notable Book and a Book Sense Pick. His latest novel, The Solitude of Emperors, was launched in September 2007 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson .
Titles
The Solitude of Emperors (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006)
The House of Blue Mangoes (Orion, 2002)