Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) wrote six novels - Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924). Maurice , written in 1914, was published posthumously in 1971. He also published two volumes of short stories; two collections of essays; a critical work (Aspects of the Novel); The Hill of Devi; two biographies; two books about Alexandria; and the libretto for Britten's opera Billy Budd. Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969 and is the author of The Romantics: A Novel and An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of From the Ruins of Empire and several other books. He is a columnist at Bloomberg View and the New York Times Book Review, and writes regularly for The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the New Yorker. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London.