Ved Mehta, born in India and educated in the United States and England, has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1961. In addition to hundreds of articles and stories, he has written twenty books, including biographies, travel journals, volumes of fiction, and an autobiographical series, Continents of Exile, the seventh volume of which, Up at Oxford, was published in 1993. His books have appeared in dozens of editions and translations, and he has received numerous awards and honors, among them a MacArthur Prize in 1982. Mehta has held the Rosenkranz Chair in Writing at Yale University and is currently the Randolph Distinguished Professor of English and History at Vassar College.