Stephen Alter (born 1956) is an author of non-fiction and fiction, who was born and raised in

India India, officially the Republic of India ( Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the ...

, where he grew up as the son of American

missionaries A missionary is a member of a religious group which is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.Thomas Hale 'On Being a Mi ...

. He lives in Littleton,

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the wes ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

and

Landour Landour, a small cantonment town contiguous with Mussoorie, is about from the city of Dehradun in the northern state of Uttarakhand in India. The twin towns of Mussoorie and Landour, together, are a well-known British Raj-era hill station in nor ...

Uttarakhand Uttarakhand ( , or ; , ), also known as Uttaranchal ( ; List of renamed places in India, the official name until 2007), is a States and union territories of India, state in the North India, northern part of India. It is often referred to as t ...

. He graduated from

Woodstock School Woodstock School is an international coeducational residential school located in Landour, a small hill station contiguous with the town of Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Woodstock is one of the oldest resi ...

(where his father, Robert Alter, served as Principal from 1968 to 1978) in Landour and subsequently from

Wesleyan University Wesleyan University ( ) is a private liberal arts university in Middletown, Connecticut. Founded in 1831 as a men's college under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church and with the support of prominent residents of Middletown, the c ...

. He has taught writing at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

and at the

American University in Cairo The American University in Cairo (AUC; ar, الجامعة الأمريكية بالقاهرة, Al-Jāmi‘a al-’Amrīkiyya bi-l-Qāhira) is a private research university in Cairo, Egypt. The university offers American-style learning progr ...

. He has been awarded

Fulbright Program The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...

and

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

grants and received an honorary degree from Wesleyan University. He is the founding director of the Mussoorie Mountain Festival. His memoir ''Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime'' received the 2015 Kekoo Naoroji Award for Himalayan Literature. His novel about Jim Corbett ''In the Jungles of the Night'' was shortlisted for the 2017 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His most recent non-fiction book, ''Wild Himalaya: A Natural History of the Greatest Mountain Range on Earth' won the Banff Book Award in the Natural History and Environment category. It also won the Kekoo Naoroji Award and was shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chatopadhyay NIF Book Prize.

Selected titles

;Non-Fiction * All the Way to Heaven: An American Boyhood in the Himalayas (1998) * Amritsar to Lahore: A Journey Across the India-Pakistan Border (2000) * Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage Up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture (2001) * Elephas Maximus: A Portrait of the Indian Elephant (2004) *Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief (2007) *Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime (2014) * Wild Himalaya: A Natural History of the Greatest Mountain Range on Earth (2019) ;Fiction * Neglected Lives (1979) * Silk and Steel (1980) * The Godchild (1988) * Renuka (1990) * Aripan & Other Stories (2005) * The Rataban Betrayal (2013) * In the Jungles of the Night: A Novel about

Jim Corbett Edward James Corbett (25 July 1875 – 19 April 1955) was a British hunter, tracker, naturalist, and author who hunted a number of man-eating tigers and leopards in the Indian subcontinent. He held the rank of colonel in the British Indian ...

(2016) * The Dalliance of Leopards (2017) * Feral Dreams: Mowgli and His Mothers (2020) ;For Young Readers * The Phantom Isles (2007) * Ghost Letters (2008) * The Secret Sanctuary (2015) * The Cloudfarers (2018) ;Editor * The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories (2001)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Alter, Stephen 1956 births American novelists of Indian descent Wesleyan University alumni Living people MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences faculty The American University in Cairo faculty Indian emigrants to the United States Writers from Dehradun Fulbright alumni