Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London, where he took his BA with First Class Honours, and completed his doctorate on critical theory and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Dervorguilla Scholar. He was Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1992-95, and Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, Cambridge University, until April 1999, where he taught the Commonwealth and International Literatures paper of the English Tripos. He was on the faculty of the School of the Arts, Columbia University, for the Fall semester, 2002. He was appointed Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Free University, Berlin, for the winter term 2005.
He is now Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.
He has written five novels.His first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, is included in Colm Toibin and Carmen Callil’s Two Hundred Best Novels of the Last Fifty Years. His second novel, Afternoon Raag, was on Anne Enright’s list of 10 Best Short Novels in the Guardian.
He has given lectures and readings at various universities and institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, New York University, Smith College, the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Wellesley College, the University of Chicago, Penn State University, and Emory University.
Recently, in October 2010, he spoke with the English philosopher Simon Critchley at the Rubin Museum in New York City about 'nothing' and then gave a concert with his band.