Samanth Subramanian

Samanth Subramanian is an Indian writer and journalist based in London.^[1][2] He studied journalism at Penn State University and international relations at Columbia University. In 2018–19, he was a Leon Levy Fellow at the City University of New York. He is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian and WIRED.

Subramanian's first book Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (2010, Penguin Books India) was a travelogue about Indian fisheries and seafood cuisine.

His second book This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan Civil War (2015, Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-0857895950) was nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize.^[3] He became only the second Indian writer after Suketu Mehta to be nominated for this prestigious award for literary non-fiction.^[1][4] William Dalrymple, writing in The Guardian, considered it a remarkable and moving portrayal of the agonies of the conflict that "will stand as a fine literary monument against the government’s attempt at imposed forgetfulness".^[2]

His third major work, A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane (2019) is a biography of J. B. S. Haldane.^[5] The book has been selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2020 by The New York Times.^[6]

His articles cover a wide variety of subjects ranging from land reclamation in Singapore^[7] to Tamil pulp fiction.^[8]

He has written about the synthesis of new chemical elements for Bloomberg Businessweek.^[9]

In April 2024, in the run-up to India's general elections, Subramanian wrote a profile of Rahul Gandhi in The New York Times Magazine covering Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Yatra, Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, and other topics.^[10]

• Official website
• Samanth Subramanian on Twitter
• Samanth Subramanian on The New Yorker
• Samanth Subramanian on The Guardian