Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. He graduated with a degree in Mathematics from Bombay University before coming to Canada in 1975. In Toronto, he worked at a bank while completing his second degree, in English and Philosophy, at the University of Toronto.
He started writing in 1983, and his first book, Tales from Firozsha Baag, was a collection of eleven linked stories that trace the patterns of life in a run-down apartment block in Bombay. Published in 1987, it was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award.
Three novels followed; all were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Such a Long Journey, which follows a Bombay bank clerk’s unwitting descent into corrupt political dealings, is set against the backdrop of the 1971 conflict between India and Pakistan, the war that ended with the birth of Bangladesh. The novel won the Governor General’s Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize – Overall Best Book, and the SmithBooks First Novel Award. It was made into an acclaimed feature film in 1998.
His second novel, A Fine Balance, takes the reader to mid-seventies India: the time during which a countrywide state of emergency was declared. The novel won the 1995 Giller Prize, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize – Overall Best Book, the Royal Society of Literature’s Winnifred Holtby Award, and the Danish Literature Council’s ALOA prize. It was selected for Oprah’s Book Club and, in 2013, on the 20th anniversary of the Giller Prize, it won the CBC Books « Giller of All Gillers. »
Family Matters (2002) is his third novel. The protagonist is a seventy-nine-year-old widower with Parkinson’s disease, negotiating domestic strife and the infirmities of old age. It won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize for Fiction and the Canadian Authors Association Fiction Award.
Rohinton Mistry was awarded a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellowship in 2004, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and, in 2010, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Other awards and honours include the 2012 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the 2024 Library and Archives Canada Scholar Award, and honorary doctorates from the University of Ottawa (1996), University of Toronto (1999), York University (2003), and Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University, 2012). In translation, his work has been published in over thirty-five languages.
He was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2015.
