Raja Rao was an Indian-American writer of English-language novels and short stories whose work is deeply rooted in metaphysics. He is best known for The Serpent and the Rope (1960), a semi-autobiographical novel about a search for spiritual truth in Europe and India, which won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1963. Kanthapura follows a small South Indian village as Gandhian nonviolence and the struggle for independence reshape everyday life there. In 1988 he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for his body of work.
