Vikram Seth was born on 20 June 1952 to Leila and Prem Seth in Calcutta. His family lived in many cities including the Bata Shoe Company town of Batanagar, Danapur near Patna, and in London.
Born in Calcutta, India, Seth spent part of his youth in London but returned to his homeland in 1957. After receiving primary and commencing secondary education at the Doon School in Dehradun in India, Seth returned to England to Tonbridge School. From there, Seth studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he developed an interest in poetry and learned Chinese. After leaving Oxford, Seth moved to California to work on a graduate degree in economics at Stanford University.
His travel book From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet was his first popular success and won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. It offers insight to Seth as a person, who is candid about the reality and effect of living abroad — though not in particular of being in diaspora — a theme which arises in his poetry but nowhere in his fiction.
Other Books of Vikram Seth includes :
Hybrid: The "novel in verse": The Golden Gate
A Suitable Boy
Two Lives
An Equal Music
Seth's range is demonstrated by the historical accuracy of A Suitable Boy, with the nuanced cultivated-Indian English of the narrative voice and the entirely in-character voices of the principals of the story; the correspondingly accurate depiction of northern California yuppies of the 1980s in The Golden Gate; and his portrait of the world of western classical musicians in An Equal Music. He has continued to produce volumes of poetry at intervals alongside his publications in a range of other forms, including translations from Chinese poets.