Raja Rao

Raja Rao was an Indian-American writer of English-language novels and short stories, whose works are deeply rooted in metaphysics. Rao has been described as a powerful writer and a scholar well versed in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian philosophies. The Serpent and the Rope (1960), a semi-autobiographical novel recounting a search for spiritual truth in Europe and India, established him as one of the finest Indian prose stylists and won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1963. For the entire body of his work, Rao was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988. Rao's wide-ranging body of work, spanning a number of genres, is seen as a varied and significant contribution to Indian English literature, as well as to World literature as a whole.