Neel Mukherjee is an Indian author. He was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India in 1967. He was educated at Loreto House, Calcutta, and graduated with a Master's degree in English literature from the University of Calcutta.
Mukherjee completed his PhD in English literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata.
He joined the Sanskrit department of the University of Calcutta in 1993 as a lecturer
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He started his creative writing career by publishing short stories in the "New Strings" literary magazine published in Kolkata in 1994.
His first full-length novel, "The Lives of Others", deal with themes of alienation and isolation in modern life, was published in 1996 by Haranam Enterprises.
He has since published three more novels: "The Middle Man" (1998), "The Sky's a Neighborhood" (2003) and "The Hungry Tide" (2009). His last novel, "The Circle of Reason", was published by Penguin Books India on 7 September 2013.
The book was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Two films have been made from his novels: "The Sky's a Neighborhood" (2005) directed by Anurag Kashyap and starring Rani Mukerji and Rahul Bose, and "The Hungry Tide" (2013) directed by Amit Dutta and starring Priyanshu Chatterjee, Konkona Sen Sharma and Ratna Pathak Shah. In 2015, Mukherjee was awarded The first Katha Sarakhi Award for Literature for his contribution to Bengali literature as well as a cash award of 30 lakhs for his contribution to Hindi literature.
In 2015 he released his first book for children called Pachisi which is a collection of several short stories for children as well as adults. In 2016 he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for Bengali translation for his novel The Sky's a Neighborhood
In 2017 he received the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose National Award for Literature from Government of India .