About Salil Tripathi

Salil Tripathi was born in Bombay, India and lives in New York. He is a contributing editor at the Caravan and wrote a column for 14 years at Mint before it ended in 2022. He chaired PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee from 2015 to 2021 and is now a member of its board. Between 2009 and 2013, he was on the board of English PEN, where he co-chaired English PEN’s Writers-at-Risk Committee (with novelist Kamila Shamsie). In 2015, he received the Red Ink Award from the Mumbai Press Club for human rights journalism. In November 2011, he won the third prize at the Bastiat Awards for Journalism about free societies, in New York. In 1994 in Hong Kong, he received one of the awards at the Citibank Pan Asia Journalism Awards for economic journalism. In 1990, the cover story he co-wrote on the ban on The Satanic Verses won a prize at the Asian Journalism Awards. He was a correspondent in India from 1987 to 1990 and moved to Singapore (and later Hong Kong) from 1991 to 1999. He lived in London from 1999-2019. He was a visiting scholar at the New York University, 2019-2022.

Offence: The Hindu Case, about the rise of Hindu nationalism and its implications on free expression, is his first book. His book on the Bangladesh War of Liberation, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy  was published by the Aleph Book Company in late 2014 for the Indian subcontinent, and by Yale University Press in Spring 2016. It was long-listed for the best work of non-fiction award at the Tata Literature Festival in 2015. Its revised and updated edition will be published in late 2026.  Detours: Songs of the Open Road, his collection of travel writing was published by Tranquebar in December 2015. He has also co-edited For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (Context, 2022) an anthology of writings about prison with the artist Shilpa Gupta. His latest book is The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community (Aleph, 2024). The Gujaratis was long-listed for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay prize  and is short-listed for the History Literature Prize.  In 2025, he edited H(e)ero, a privately published biography of the late Arunkumar Mehta, former chief executive of Rosy Blue, the world’s largest sight-holder for rough diamonds.

His essay on Myanmar has appeared in The Himalayan Arc, a collection edited by Namita Gokhale. He has written several essays on freedom in recent anthologies, including in Words Matter: Writings Against Silence, edited by the poet K Satchidanandan, in  A Thousand Cranes for India: Reclaiming Plurality Amid Hatred, edited by Pallavi Aiyar, and in Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories from India’s Best Writers, edited by Nilanjana Roy.

His poems have appeared in Gossamer, an anthology of world poetry, edited by Pritha Kejriwal, Witness: The Red River Book of Poetry of Dissent, edited by Nabina Das, Rivers Going Home: 71 Poets in Solidarity, edited by Ashwani Kumar, Silence of the Fireflies, edited by P Mukherjee, Count Every Breath: A Climate Anthology,edited by Vinita Agrawal, and Scent of Rain, a tribute to Jayanta Mahapatra, edited by Ashwani Kumar. His first collection of poetry in Gujarati will appear in late 2026.

Salil has written for many publications around the world. These include The Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Washington Post, New York Times, New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, New Republic, New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and Philadelphia Inquirer in the United States; Guardian, Independent, Financial Times, Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Prospect, and Index on Censorship in the United Kingdom; Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong; Global Asia in South Korea; National and Khaleej Times in the United Arab Emirates; Shinchosha in Japan, and a few other publications. In India, he had been assistant editor at the Indian Post and senior correspondent at India Today.

He has been a senior visiting fellow for business and human rights at the Kennedy School, Harvard University, and is also an adviser to several global initiatives involving business and human rights. His academic writing has appeared in the Business and Human Rights Journal, Politorbis, the Netherlands Quarterly for Human Rights, and Oxford Development Studies, and chapters in several academic books.

Salil studied at the New Era School in Bombay and graduated from Sydenham College at  the University of Bombay. He later obtained his Masters in Business Administration from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College in the United States.