Jeet Thayil was born in Kerala, India in 1959 and was educated in Hong Kong, New York, and Bombay. He is a performance poet and songwriter with a variety of published works: Gemini (1992); Apocalypso (1997); English (2004), These Errors Are Correct (2008), Narcopolis (2012), Collected Poems (2015), The Book of Chocolate Saints (2017), and Low (2020).
He is also the editor of Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora (2006), a book of essays; the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008); and 60 Indian Poets (2008).
In 2012, he wrote the libretto for the opera, Babur in London, in collaboration with the composer Edward Rushton.
His first novel, Narcopolis (2012), set in Bombay in the 1970s and '80s,was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Jeet Thayil lives in New Delhi, India.