Saikat Majumdar is a novelist and critic. He is the author of five novels, most recently, The Remains of the Body, published as Penguin Random House’s 2024 Pride Month Selection. His novel, The Scent of God (2019), a story of love between two teenage boys in a Hindu monastic boarding school, was a finalist for the inaugural Mathrubhumi Book Award. His other novels include The Firebird (2015), which narrates a young boy’s destructive obsession with his mother’s life as an actress, and The Middle Finger (2022), a queer, contemporary college-campus retelling of the Ekalavya story. He has also published four books of nonfiction and criticism, including The Amateur (2024), selected by The Chronicle of Higher Education as one of the Best Scholarly Books of 2024, Prose of the World (2013) and College (2018), a popular book on interdisciplinary liberal arts education in India. He has been a fellow at Wellesley College, the institutes of Advanced Study in JNU, Stellenbosch, and Budapest, and is currently Professor of English & Creative Writing at Ashoka University.