Karan Mahajan

Karan Mahajan is an Indian-American novelist. Born in New Delhi in 1984, he was raised in India and attended Stanford University. He is a contributing editor at The Paris Review. His debut novel Family Planning (2008) is a comic novel about a large Indian political family. His second novel The Association of Small Bombs (2016) tells the story of an explosion in a Delhi market and its aftermath, following both its survivors and its perpetrators. The Association of Small Bombs was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2017, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and other honours. It was praised for its formal ambition, its psychological depth in portraying the experience of terrorism and its aftermath from multiple perspectives, and its contribution to literary fiction about political violence in South Asia. Mahajan has received fellowships and awards from various arts organisations and has written for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Guardian. He lives in Brooklyn.